Wayward Son (2 page)

Then the bells sounded once again.

CHAPTER 1

Malibu, California

ROLLING OVER ONTO HER side, she opened her eyes, reached to the nightstand, and fumbled for her iPhone. The insistent bell tower ringtone indicated an unknown caller, and the display read Blocked. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, she drowsily answered the phone and brought it to her ear. Who could be calling at 4:07 in the morning?

“Amanda?” The voice was tentative, yet startlingly familiar.

“Juan Carlos!” She blinked hard and shook her head slightly.

“Did I wake you up?”

“Actually, I’m glad you did. Are you in LA?”

“No, I’m in Ercolano helping with the new excavations.”

“You’re in Italy? What about Real Madrid?”

“Oh, soccer is history now. I tore up my knee last season and had to quit. I moved here in the fall. I’ve been here almost a year now. My grandfather Silvio got me the job.”

“So you’re back to archaeology.” From their days in college together at UCLA, Amanda knew it was his first love. She pictured Juan Carlos in Erco-lano—ancient Herculaneum, the Roman resort town on the Bay of Naples in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. The volcano’s catastrophic eruption had buried the town, together with neighboring Pompeii, in the first century AD. It was an archaeologist’s dream.

His voice pulled her back. “Yes, yes, but we can catch up on all that later. I’m sorry to call you so early, but it’s really urgent that we talk about the
nuovi scavi
.”

“
Digame
, Johnny.” Spanish to his Italian, accompanied by the pet name only she was allowed to use.

“You read about the earthquake last month?”

“Everyone did. It was so weird. August 24. The exact anniversary of Vesuvius in 79 AD.”

“Right! Well, our team is exploring a site near the Villa dei Papiri. Up to now, no one rated it as very interesting. But the earthquake opened up a narrow crack in a wall of rock, only half a meter wide at its entrance but very deep. We sent in a robot with a fiber-optic camera, but even its path was partially blocked by fallen rocks.”

“And…?” The romance of archaeology was one of the links that had brought them together.

“
And
we have distant pictures of a half-obscured bronze door—perhaps the entrance to a large underground chamber. But it’s what’s inscribed
on
the door that’s amazing. Latin and Greek, of course. But we can also make out Aramaic, Hebrew, and Chinese!”

Amanda nearly dropped her phone. “Aramaic? Chinese?”

“
Incredibile, ma vero
. You must see the pictures. I would e-mail a few, but this find is highly confidential at the moment. But that’s not really why I’m calling. No one here has the language skills to handle this. Plus we need someone with field experience and a slim figure who can navigate the long crevice. I want you to come to Italy…”

“But Johnny, I can’t just pick up and leave my job for—”

“Amanda,” Juan Carlos cut in with an urgent tone, “Silvio has reason to believe that this could be bigger than
the Dead Sea Scrolls
. Maybe even than the Rosetta Stone. We need you. You can fit through that crack easily, brush away the dust, and decipher the rest of the words. If we can get the door open, no one is as qualified as you to make a survey of the chamber. And time is of the essence!”

“How do you think I’ll get permission from the Getty so fast?” Ever since her graduation from UCLA, the Getty had supported Amanda’s PhD in papyrology. Now she was full time on the staff of the Getty Museum’s Villa location in Malibu.

“No problem. Silvio spoke to Dr. Walker late yesterday. Arrangements are being made. You know that the Getty and Silvio’s employer are partners with the Italian authorities. I guarantee that Walker will let you come over. I think they may even pay for your airline ticket.”

Amanda wavered. She couldn’t just leave everything and jet over to Italy, could she? But what if it was bigger than the Rosetta Stone? Juan Carlos had always had a level head. And Silvio, his grandfather, was a world-renowned archaeologist, the head of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale for the past thirty years.

“When would I come?”

“Immediately. We don’t know how long we can keep the discovery under wraps. I already looked at flight schedules and…”

“Are you talking about today?”

“Absolutely. You can catch a British Airways flight from LAX tonight at 11:00. You’ll be at Fiumicino Airport in Rome tomorrow night at 11:30 our time. I’ll meet you there outside the baggage claim and we’ll drive a few hours to Ercolano.”

Amanda smiled. “You seem to have thought of everything. But I still have to talk to Walker. And I’ll need to make arrangements for Plato.” She looked down to the foot of the bed where her seal point Siamese lay curled up like a question mark.

“Plato? Who’s Plato?”

Was that jealousy in his voice? “Only the cat I got last year at the shelter.”

“Oh, of course. Can you call me back later today?”

“Right after I see Walker. What time is it there now?”

“Lunchtime. Just after one o’clock.”

“I’ll call you before you eat dinner.”

“It’ll be great to see you again.”

Amanda paused. “Before dinner, then. And Johnny, one last question.”

“Yes?”

“How did you find my cell number?”

“
O chica mia
, I never lost it. Ciao.”

As the line went dead, she could hear him smile.

***

Amanda slid her custom surfboard into the back of her Jeep. The yellow Wrangler had been a twenty-first birthday present from her dad, and although it was now seven years old, she couldn’t think of parting with it. The Jeep symbolized the special bond between Amanda and her father, forged after her mom’s early death from cancer. For almost ten years he had been her only parent. Then, at the end of her senior year at UCLA, he died tragically. A product engineer for Pacific Oil & Gas and an ex-Marine, he had tried to save a group of trapped workers in a refinery fire in Nigeria. He saved them all, but paid with his life.

Since Roger James’s death, his only child had found solace in the ocean. Although bothered since her early teens by an occasional bad dream that, like this morning’s, usually involved drowning, Amanda was not one to give fear any reign in her life. As for many surfers, the waves helped to keep her centered. Amanda surfed in the early morning near the Getty Villa in Malibu whenever conditions were right. She had met some good buddies, but it was the sport’s solitude that appealed to her above all else—that and the moment of release that came with carving the face of the perfect wave.

Amanda knew from yesterday’s wave report that an offshore Santa Ana wind would combine with swells from a storm off the coast of Mexico to produce impressive waves on California’s south-facing beaches. And after the phone call from Juan Carlos Bribon, she needed some time to mull things over. Amanda did some of her best thinking on her board. At 5:15, as the morning light was barely a glimmer, she cruised through the residential streets of Malibu and picked up the main artery, the Pacific Coast Highway—PCH in local lingo—and headed north to Point Dume.

Amanda’s favorite break lay at the base of hundred-foot-tall sandstone cliffs that offered some of the most stunning ocean vistas in southern California. The mansions at Point Dume were the trophies of business tycoons rather than Hollywood stars. Amanda, who had lived all over the world because of her father’s job assignments, sometimes amused herself by conjuring up comparisons to Point Dume. There was Acapulco in Mexico, of course, with its countless red-tiled haciendas overlooking the azure waters of the Pacific; and Ercolano, playground for the elite of the early Roman Empire. The estates of Cap d’Antibes in the south of France were similar, as was Victoria Harbor as seen from the Peak in Hong Kong—anywhere that human materialism clung to natural beauty like a barnacle.

As was typical in September, mist shrouded the coastline when Amanda parked her jeep on an inconspicuous turnoff on PCH. Jogging across the highway with her board under her arm, she followed a nearly hidden path between two large properties. In a dark wetsuit, her figure was barely noticeable in the half-light.

It had taken her months of trial and error to find the narrow path. The estates on each side were lavishly, and almost impenetrably, landscaped with sprawling, ground-level bougainvillea and tall hedges of gorse, with its distinctive fragrance of vanilla and almond. Using thorns and spines—albeit tastefully—the wealthy owners had made every effort to choke off access to the ocean in order to maintain their precious privacy. Amanda smiled slightly as she threaded her way between the bushes. “Surfers are sometimes more resourceful than billionaires,” she thought wryly. The public still owned everything below the mean high-water mark, at least according to the California Coastal Commission.

Reaching the cliff’s edge, Amanda carefully negotiated the steep steps that led to the beach. Even in the semidarkness, she could see that the text message from SoCal Surfwatch had been right on. The swells stretched in perfect lines that reached to the horizon. Long, slow curls punctuated the break in even sets, shoulder high for the most part with a few overheads. As she attached her leash just above the small, ancient scroll tattooed on the inside of her right ankle, Amanda noted with satisfaction that she was in sole possession of the break. Taking a deep breath and clearing her mind, she positioned her five-foot-ten frame along the center of her board and began to paddle out. In half an hour, the sun would be up.

She paddled and caught, paddled and thought. It was a biorhythm by now. As she listened to the surf, the colors diffused through the thinning mist. “Why is this dawn special?” she wondered. Somehow one telephone call had lifted a weight from her shoulders. A longer interval between sets arrived and, with characteristic discipline, she made a mental inventory.

On the one hand, Juan Carlos had made an offer that was hard to refuse. Her job had begun to weigh on her. Dr. Walker never really criticized her, but neither did he seem likely to promote her. Exploring a major find in the nuovi scavi ruins might have a professional payoff. She had been to Ercolano a few times before, when she worked on papyri for the Philodemus Project for her PhD at UCLA. The Bay of Naples wasn’t hard to look at, even after Point Dume!

But there were questions in her mind, most of them about Juan Carlos. Was he aiming to rekindle the romance they had shared as undergraduates? Did she want him to? He had been her lifeguard when her dad died—a save that neither of them would ever forget. She’d been on the floor in her bathroom, with several Vicodin in her stomach and a fifth of vodka clutched in her hand. She vaguely recalled a breakneck ride to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where they pumped her stomach. Although her religious life had seen its ups and downs, Amanda thought she had found a guardian angel. But how did that square with their drifting apart after graduation?

They had met eight years earlier, as juniors at UCLA, after he scored the winning goal in the conference championship game. The memory of Juan Carlos throwing his jersey in the air, displaying his impeccably chiseled torso to thousands of cheering fans, was etched in Amanda’s brain. She almost blushed while waiting for the next set of swells to form.

“What would Dad want me to do?” She was pretty sure of the answer. An ex-Marine, Roger James had always aimed for the jugular. Though not a classicist like his daughter, he would often quote the Roman poet Horace’s maxim, Carpe diem! By urging Amanda to “seize the day,” Roger let her know that, in his mind, anything was possible for a young woman growing into the twenty-first century.

Now the sun was up. Bits of mist still clung to the coastline in a golden halo shimmering around the palaces of Point Dume. As she rode her final wave, Amanda’s gaze fell on the largest mansion. This was, in fact, one of the properties bisected by the border path that led to the beach.

It had been completed only recently. From a segment on
Entertainment Tonight
, she’d learned that it belonged to Luc Renard, a tabloid billionaire with business interests around the globe. The property was about fifty acres, and the main house—as distinguished from numerous outbuildings—dwarfed all of the neighboring mansions. Renard had christened it with a distinctive name: Villa Colosseum.

“How odd,” thought Amanda absently. The Roman Colosseum was an arena of blood sports and death, so why would anyone name his house that way? But that thought drifted from her mind as her board glided lazily through the shore wash. It was time to go back to the apartment and get ready for work.

After jogging across the short stretch of beach with her board and climbing toward the path, Amanda recalled a tabloid story she had seen about an all-night party at Villa Colosseum. She found herself thinking about the mansion again. What did such a place look like on the inside? she wondered. Who made it onto the invitation list, and how?

Soon Amanda had forgotten all about Renard’s villa as she warmed up inside the Wrangler. The upbeat, mellow sounds of Jack Johnson’s acoustic guitar rang from her speakers, the perfect accompaniment to the brightening day. By seven thirty, she was back in the apartment, smiling at Plato’s usual noisy greeting at the door.

“I really have to hustle,” she thought. She realized that the surf session had done its work—she had already made an unconscious decision. She would go to Ercolano. But Juan Carlos wanted her on a flight from LAX tonight. She stepped into the shower, grabbed a razor, and tried to shampoo her hair and shave her long, well-muscled legs in record time. While the steamy water engulfed her body, she wondered what Juan Carlos would think about her newly toned shape. When they dated in college, she had not yet taken up surfing.

Amanda lived in a small one-bedroom apartment—all she could afford in the high-rent district of Malibu—but at least it had decent closet space. How long would her trip last? Since there was no way of knowing, she decided to play the odds and pack outfits that could be recycled every three or four days. Within twenty minutes, she’d slotted a basic wardrobe into her mother’s well-worn Louis Vuitton waterproof canvas. It held not only Amanda’s clothing, but also the memories from their many travels together during her childhood.