The Last Gospel (39 page)

Costas looked pained. ‘We’re going underground again, Jack.’

‘It’s just your kind of thing. A city of the dead.’

‘Great.’

Jack paused, looked at the young man for a moment, decided not to speak, then nodded and walked towards the door, Costas following. They went through, and immediately the door was shut behind them. It was pitch dark except for the candles they were carrying and a faint glow somewhere ahead. It had been hot and dry outside, but the air was cool and damp as they descended, becoming musty. Jack led, carefully feeling his way down the steps until he reached a rough stone floor. They could see that the glow ahead of them was a candle on the floor. After reaching it Jack did as instructed, snuffing it out with his fingers and picking it up, then turning right and going down another flight of steps into a rock-cut chamber, evidently an ancient mausoleum long since cleared of its contents. At the bottom to the left was a stone door opened inwards in the rock, and through it they could see another distant pool of candlelight, just as before. They passed through, and Jack pushed the door back until it was shut, seamlessly fitting into the rock as if it were a secret entranceway.

‘Incredible,’ he murmured, looking around in the flickering candlelight, making out the niches and decorations on the walls. ‘It’s a catacomb. The mausolea we’ve just come through were originally above ground in the Roman period, a street of tombs. But this deeper part must always have been subterranean, cut into the living rock. The Vatican has never revealed this before.’

‘Makes you wonder what else they haven’t revealed,’ Costas murmured.

Jack stepped forward, sensing images on either side of him, inscriptions, paintings. He stopped at one, and held the candle forward. ‘Amazing,’ he whispered. ‘It’s intact. The catacombs are intact, the burials are still here.’

‘Just what I wanted to know,’ Costas moaned.

‘They’re sealed up, plastered over. Look, this inscription’s legible.
In Pace
.’ Jack faltered. ‘It’s early Christian, very early. It dates well before the time of Constantine the Great. A secret burial place, used when the Christians in Rome were outlawed, persecuted. This is a fantastic find. I can’t see why they haven’t made it public.’

‘Maybe something to do with this.’ Costas was ahead now, not far from the candle on the floor, and Jack cautiously followed. ‘It’s a raised area, covered with pottery tiles,’ Costas said. He made his way along the left side of the passageway and squatted down beside the candle.

‘It’s a tomb,’ Jack said quietly. ‘You sometimes get them in the floor of catacombs, as well as along the sides. Sometimes the floor tombs were the more important ones.’

‘Jack, I might be hallucinating. That déjà vu thing you were on about under the Palatine Hill. Maybe a delayed nitrogen effect.’

‘What is it?’

‘That tile. Below the candle. There’s an inscription scratched on it. Either I’m seeing things, or it’s identical to a word we’ve come across before.’

Jack edged up behind Costas. There were decorative scratchings around the edge of the tile, like a wreath of vine tendrils. In the centre he saw what had sent a tremor through Costas. It was a name, unmistakable, a name they had seen scratched on pottery like this before, on an ancient shipwreck hundreds of miles away, lost for almost two millennia beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The name of a man, written in Latin.

PAVLVS
.

Could it be? Jack looked around, saw the widening of the passage, the other tombs crowding in on this spot but not built over it, as if their occupants had wanted to be close to it, in reverence. He saw Christian symbols everywhere, a dove on the wall beside him, a fish, the Christian formula in inscriptions again and again,
in pace
. And then as Costas moved his candle over the tile he saw it faintly scratched beside the name, the chi-rho symbol.
The sign of Christ
.

‘The tomb of St Paul,’ he whispered incredulously, laying his hand on a tile. ‘St Peter and St Paul, interred in the same place,
ad catacumbus
, just as tradition says.’

‘It is so.’

Jack drew back, startled. The voice came from a shadowy niche opposite them, in the wall beyond the head of the tomb. He could just make out a black cassock over legs, but not the upper body. The voice was authoritative, with an edge to it, the English slightly accented, possibly east European. ‘Do not attempt to approach me. Please extinguish your candles. Sit on the stone bench behind you.’ Jack paused for a second, then nodded at Costas, and they did as instructed. The only source of light now was the candle on the tomb, and everything else was reduced to flickering shadow and darkness. The other figure shifted slightly, and they could just make out a hooded head, hands placed on knees. ‘I have summoned you here today in the greatest secrecy. I wanted you to see what you have just seen.’

‘Who are you?’ Costas said.

‘You will not be told my name, nor who I am,’ the man repeated. ‘Do not ask again.’

‘This truly is the tomb of St Paul?’ Jack said.

‘It is so,’ the man repeated.

‘What about the church of San Paulo fuori le Mura?’ Jack said. ‘Isn’t he supposed to have been buried there, in a vineyard?’

‘He was indeed taken there after his death, but was brought back here secretly to be reunited with Peter, at the place of their martyrdom.’

‘It is true, then,’ Jack murmured.

‘They were martyred together by the emperor Nero, in the circus built at this spot by Caligula. Peter was crucified upside down, and Paul was beheaded. The Romans made martyrs of the two greatest fathers of the early Church, and in doing so the pagan emperors helped to bring the Holy See into being at this place.
In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, amen
.’

‘You have brought us here to show us this?’ Jack said.

There was a pause, and the man shifted again. The candle on the tomb wavered, lengthening the shadow so that for a few moments he was obscured completely, then the flame burned upright again. ‘You will by now know that the Roman emperor Claudius faked his own poisoning, and survived in secret for many years beyond the end of his reign in AD 54.’

Jack peered into the shadows, unsure how much to reveal. ‘How do you know this?’

‘By telling you what I am about to tell, I test my bond with the sanctity of the Church. But it will be so.’ The man paused, and then reached into the shadows beside him and lifted an ancient leatherbound volume on to his lap. Jack could now see his hands, strong, long-fingered hands that had seen physical toil, but he could still not see his face. ‘In AD 58, St Paul came to Italy from the east, surviving the famous shipwreck on the way. It was as it is told in the Acts of the Apostles, except that the shipwreck was off Sicily, not Malta.’

Costas glanced questioningly at Jack, who flashed an exultant look back at him. Neither of them spoke.

‘St Paul came first to the Bay of Naples, to Misenum, and met with the Christian brethren he found there, as recounted in Acts,’ the man continued quietly, almost whispering. ‘After the crucifixion, it was the single most important event in the early history of Christianity. Paul was the first to take the word of Jesus beyond the Holy Land, the first true missionary. When he left Misenum for Rome, those whom he first instructed called themselves a
concilium
, the
concilium ecclesiasticum Sancta Paula
.’

‘The council of the church of St Paul,’ Jack translated.

‘They were three in number, and they remain three today.’

‘Today?’ Jack said, astonished. ‘This
concilium
still exists?’

‘For generations, for almost three centuries, the
concilium
was a secret organization, a pillar of strength for the early Church when it was fighting for its very survival, when Christianity was still an underground religion. At first they met in the Phlegraean Fields, and then they took over the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae, after the last of the Sibyls had disappeared. Later, as Christianity took hold, the
concilium
moved to Rome, to these catacombs where we sit now, to the place where the martyred body of St Paul was buried in secret by his followers after his beheading, near the hallowed tomb of St Peter.’

‘And this
concilium
has been meeting here ever since?’ Costas said.

‘By the time of the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the leaders of the
concilium
saw its purpose over and disbanded it, sealing up the catacomb of St Paul. Its location was lost, and was only rediscovered during the necropolis excavation following the Second World War. Only since then has this chamber again become the meeting place.’

‘The
concilium
was re-created in modern times?’ Jack said.

‘It was called forth again by Constantine the Great, near the end of his reign. He reconstituted the
concilium
in its original number, three, and in the greatest secrecy. He had invested much in converting the state to Christianity. As a statesman, as a soldier, he saw the need to defend the Church, to create a council of war which would send out soldiers to fight in the name of Christ, who would show no mercy in the face of the devil, who would follow no rules of engagement. Over the centuries, the
concilium
fought off the most pernicious of heresies, the ones the Inquisition of the Holy See were unable to defeat. In Britain they fought the Pelagians, sending Pelagius himself to the fires of hell. They fought the Protestants after the Reformation, a secret war of terror and murder that nearly destroyed Europe. After the New World was discovered, the
concilium
ordered the destruction of the Maya and the Aztec and the Inca, fearing a prophecy of the ancient Sibyl that foretold a coming darkness from the west.’

‘And these were men of God,’ Costas murmured.

‘They were believers in the sanctity and power of the Church, in the Roman Church as the only route to salvation and the kingdom of heaven,’ the man said. ‘Constantine the Great was an astute statesman. He knew that the survival of the Church depended on unswerving loyalty, on the faith of his holy warriors in the Church as the only route to God. In his revived
concilium
, he created his perfect enforcers.’

‘Can you prove all this?’ Costas said.

The man lifted the book slightly into the candlelight. ‘The records of the
Consilium Ecclesiasticum Sancta Paula
. One day the world will know. History will be rewritten.’

‘What does this have to do with Claudius?’ Jack said.

The man leaned forward slightly, and the candelight flickered off the shadowy outline of his face. ‘It is the greatest threat the
concilium
has ever faced, and their greatest fear. It is the reason why I have brought you here. You and your team are in the gravest danger, far more so than you may realize.’

‘We realize what it’s like to look down the business end of a Beretta 93,’ Costas said. ‘Inside a cavern under the Palatine Hill.’

‘He had instructions not to shoot,’ the man said quietly.

‘Then maybe the
concilium
should employ more obedient henchmen,’ Costas said.

‘How did you know?’ Jack said. ‘How did the
concilium
know we’d be diving under Rome?’ The man was silent, and Jack persisted. ‘Was there someone listening in the tunnel at Herculaneum? Was it the inspector, Dr Elizabeth d’Agostino?’

‘We know she spoke to you outside the Villa.’

‘How do you know?’ Jack felt a sudden chill run through him. What if it was more than fear that had prevented her from returning his calls? ‘Where is she now?’

‘There are spies everywhere.’

‘Even on board
Seaquest II
?’ Costas said.

‘You need to do everything you can to find what you are looking for and to reveal it to the world before they get to you,’ the man said intently. ‘Once they know where it is, they will do everything in their power to destroy you. I have done all that I can, but I cannot restrain them any more.’

‘Dr d’Agostino?’ Jack persisted.

‘As I said, I have done all that I can.’

‘Why should you want to help us?’ Costas said.

The man paused. ‘Let me tell you about Claudius.’ He opened the book at the beginning. They could just see the ancient writing in the dim candlelight, extensively annotated in the margins and clearly in several different hands, reminiscent of the page from Pliny’s
Natural History
they had found at Herculaneum, but more ragged and stained, as if it had been pored over many times. ‘This page recounts the founding of the original
concilium
, in the first century AD,’ the man said, shutting the book again and putting his hands over it. ‘One of the first three members was a man named Narcissus, a freedman of the emperor Claudius.’

‘Good God,’ Jack murmured.

‘The eunuch? We’ve met him,’ Costas said. ‘Lying across the doorway into Claudius’ study. Looked as if he was heading in, reaching for something. He got a little singed.’

‘Ah.’ The man was quiet for a moment. ‘You found Narcissus. For almost two thousand years we have wondered.’

‘I think I can guess now what he was doing there,’ Jack murmured.

‘You will know then that Narcissus was Claudius’ long-serving
praepositus ab epistulis
, his scribe,’ the man said. ‘When Claudius decided to disappear from Rome in AD 54, he also engineered Narcissus’ fake poisoning so that he could accompany his master to his hideaway in Herculaneum, and help him with his books. But after AD 58, there was another reason for Narcissus to stay on. He always accompanied Claudius on his nocturnal visits to the cave of the Sibyl, where Claudius sought a cure for his palsy. Narcissus came to know the Christians who hid in the Phlegraean Fields, and he himself converted after meeting St Paul there. Narcissus already knew that Claudius had been to Judaea as a young man, that he had met the Messiah and had returned with a precious document. Paul himself had never met Jesus, and was astonished to hear from Narcissus that something written in the hand of Christ might survive. He instructed Narcissus to find and bring the document to him in Rome, where Paul was going next. History overtook Paul, of course, and he was martyred, and Narcissus never found it. Claudius had been too cunning even for him. But the clamour for the document grew among the Christian brethren in the Phlegraean Fields, and word spread that Claudius was an anointed one, that he had touched Christ. The other two members of the
concilium
saw the threat this posed, a threat against their authority, and they implored Narcissus to find the document, to destroy it. They believed it to be false, a heresy, a fable dreamed up by Claudius, a man who they only ever saw delusional, after his visits to the Sibyl. Finally, Narcissus left Claudius one night at the cave of the Sibyl and made his way back to Herculaneum, intending to burn the study and all the books. That was the night of 24 August AD 79.’