The Last Gospel (51 page)

‘Jeremy.’ Jack felt another cold jab in the pit of his stomach.

‘He is alive. For the time being. As are your colleagues in Naples. Safe in the folds of our extended family.’ The man nodded towards the shadowy figure behind Costas. ‘When the time comes, it will be quick. A bullet in the head, another soul sent to hell. That has always been their way.’

‘How did you know I wouldn’t tell others? About the
concilium
?’

‘Because you needed to keep it secret until you had found what we seek. I told you that others were searching for it, that you were in grave danger. And I was telling the truth. I saw through you, Dr Howard, when you were sitting in front of me in Rome, beside the tomb of St Paul. I took you into my confidence, and you thought you saw something sympathetic, something kindred. But you cannot escape the
concilium
. We will always prevail.’

‘You mean
you
can’t escape it,’ Jack said, playing for time. ‘You’re wrong.
I
saw through you. You weren’t just telling us the truth about the
concilium
, you were telling us what you really felt. You needed to confess, even though you were living a lie. You wanted to break free, but you didn’t have the strength.’

‘Blasphemy,’ the man spat out, his voice quavering. ‘I could never break my covenant. That is my strength.’

‘Do you really think St Paul would have wanted all this?’ Jack said.

‘St Paul was our founder,’ the man replied.

‘Really?’ Jack said. ‘I thought it was Constantine the Great. You told us yourself. The
concilium
was re-created as his secret council of war.’

‘He foresaw the battles we have had to fight, the sacrifices we have had to make.
In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti
. Our war is the war of all humanity. The devil is omnipresent.’

‘Only in your mind,’ Jack said. ‘The
concilium
sought out dissent, and created fire. Self-fulfilling, and self-consuming. ’

‘I think not, Dr Howard,’ the man said icily.

‘You won’t get far with these thugs as henchmen.’

‘There are plenty more where he came from.’ The man gestured into the shadows behind him. ‘Our extended family, as I said.’

‘Family? And how does your family treat their relatives? Elizabeth d’ Agostino was a friend of mine.’

‘Ah, Elizabeth. She was my pupil, I drew her in, but when the time came she lacked the strength to pledge the covenant. It is always honour that has ruled in her family, and we have always found that most convenient. Their honour was to serve us, and she betrayed them. We know she tried to warn you, when you were in Herculaneum. Even then she knew her fate.’

‘What have you done to her?’

‘The path will be cleansed. We will prevail.’

Jack felt anger well up inside him, but knew he had to keep his cool. ‘If I were you, I’d be careful who I trust,’ he said, his voice level. ‘They’re drug-runners now, not servants of the Lord. One day they’ll come for you.’

‘Blasphemy,’ the man hissed again. ‘They have been our faithful servants always. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change.’

‘Wrong again,’ Jack said. ‘Others will seek you out, for what you have done. Once the world knows, the weight of your own history will destroy you.’

‘Nobody will know. We never leave a trail.’ The man gestured into the darkness beside him. ‘There are eleven water cisterns dug deep into the rock below this place. You are already inside your own tomb.’ He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and held it up. ‘When we are finished here, I will go outside and call Naples. By the end of today, your colleagues will all be gone. None of this will ever have happened.’

Jack glanced at his watch.
Two minutes
. ‘The smell of death,’ he said. ‘You can’t hide the smell of death.’ He looked at Costas, who was suddenly staring at him, and seemed to have stopped breathing.

‘Everything here smells of death,’ the man sneered. ‘Have you ever been to the Mount of Olives? That sickly-sweet smell is everywhere. And you won’t be the first. From Pelagius onwards, others have brought their delusions here, and gone no further. We will not let blasphemy visit the tomb of Christ, our Lord.’

‘You believe that? That he was buried here?’ Jack said.

‘This was the place of the resurrection. We know little of Jesus the man.’

‘That’s your trouble.’

‘Enough of this,’ the man said, his voice suddenly shrill. ‘You will give us what you have found. It makes no difference whether your companions die now or over your dead body.’ He clicked his fingers into the shadows, and Costas and Helena suddenly lurched out, the man with the silenced pistol behind them. ‘Give it to me now, and the end will be quick.’

Jack took a deep breath, reached into his bag and felt around, deliberately smearing what he was searching for with the wet grime that was still on his hands from the tunnel. He pulled the object out, walked forward and placed it on the altar, beside the statue of the woman with the cross. He stepped back. Costas and Helena both stared at it, transfixed, but said nothing. It was the bronze cylinder from the tomb in London, the cylinder Claudius had put there. Jack had carried it with him to California and then to Jerusalem, convinced that somewhere along the line it still had a role to play. The man had stepped back into the shadows as Jack approached, but now reached over and snatched the cylinder, holding it at arm’s length behind his shoulder, shielding himself from it. ‘It is as it should be,’ he whispered. ‘The will of the
concilium
is done.’

Jack glanced at his watch.
Zero hour
. He pointed at the cylinder. ‘You might want to check inside,’ he said quietly.

‘I will not gaze upon blasphemy,’ the man said, his voice contorted. ‘It is a falsehood, created by that fool Claudius. A falsehood that has deluded all who have sought it. I will burn it and crush it and throw it into your tomb. You can cherish your treasure in oblivion.’ He clicked his fingers, and Costas was pushed towards a dark hole in the floor beside him, the barrel of the pistol in the nape of his neck.

Jack threw himself forward and held his hands up. ‘Wait!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s something else you should see.’ He reached towards the flap of his bag. The pistol swung abruptly towards his head. He stopped his hand in mid-air. ‘It’s just a computer.’ Nobody moved, and there was silence. Jack cautiously withdrew a palm-sized laptop from his bag. The gun was still trained on him. He walked slowly back and set the laptop on the altar in front of the statue, flipping the lid open. He had already switched it on when he was fumbling in his bag. The screen showed the IMU logo, with a headline and three paragraphs of text beneath. ‘I set up this page an hour ago, when we were on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre. We used Helena’s wireless connection to e-mail it to our press agency contact here. Morgan has taken a disc with the full text in person to the agency. I wrote it during our flight from Los Angeles.’ He tapped a key to enlarge the text. The banner headline was now splashed across the top of the screen:

Jack turned to the man in the shadows. ‘You see?’ he said coldly, his temper barely in control. ‘I too have friends. Willing brethren, as you would say. As we speak, this story is being syndicated around the world. I arranged for the press release at nineteen hundred hours, three minutes ago. The whole story. My name, your name. This place. Two thousand years of terrorism and murder. Everything you so helpfully told us about the
concilium
.’

The man said nothing, and then there was a sneering laugh. ‘You don’t even know my name.’

‘Wrong again,’ Jack replied. ‘That’s one thing Elizabeth did manage to say to me, Cardinal Ritter.’

The man twisted in rage and tripped backwards, scrabbling for the wall. At that moment there was a clatter and a blinding light from the stairway at the entrance to the chapel. Everything suddenly happened at once. Costas ducked forward, then swung his left shoulder back at the figure behind him, catching him in the stomach and sending him sprawling. There were shouts in Hebrew, and two uniformed figures advanced out of the light with M4 carbines trained ahead. One of them pulled the gag out of Costas’ mouth and slashed his wrist tie. Costas sneezed violently, then lurched over to Jack, breathing hard. ‘That came in handy,’ he panted, nodding at the bronze cylinder. Helena stumbled over to help Costas.

Jack looked back to the light, and could see Ben standing guard at the entrance to the room, an Israeli police inspector and Morgan alongside. He reached out and held Costas by the shoulders. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said, suddenly exhausted. He gave Costas a tired smile, then gestured at the bronze cylinder. ‘And now you know. I haven’t become a treasure-hunter after all. I only loot artefacts if there’s something bigger at stake.’

‘Don’t try to tell me you planned this back then,’ Costas panted.

‘Just a contingency. But sending Morgan to orchestrate the press release and find Ben was a big gamble.’

‘A serious bit of time management.’

Jack jerked his head towards the dark opening of the cistern in the floor. ‘I just thought something like this might happen.’

‘So Elizabeth really told you his name?’

Jack shook his head, and paused. ‘We only spoke for a few moments outside the villa in Herculaneum. Maybe she was about to tell me, or thought she’d be able to tell me later. Anyway, Jeremy and I worked through all the possibilities. Our man’s mention of the Viking félag was the giveway, when he gave us his spiel under St Peter’s. We’ve been head to head with this guy before. That narrowed it down.’

‘I’m really sorry about Elizabeth, Jack.’

‘We don’t know anything yet for sure. I’m going to get Ben and the police to give this guy a going-over before we leave this place, though I doubt whether he’ll spill anything.’

‘His henchman might.’

Jack looked at the unconscious figure sprawled on the floor beside them, a policeman standing above him. ‘God knows, he was probably related to her.’

Helena stood up, and put her arms around Jack. He could feel her shaking, but she was putting on a brave face. ‘That was nicely choreographed. Not the Jack Howard I remember. Planning ahead was never your strong point. You always followed your nose.’

‘That reminds me,’ Costas said, sneezing again. ‘Thanks for the bit about the smell of death. A nice little touch. I nearly threw up into that gag.’

‘I thought you needed a little incentive.’

‘Never mention that stuff again, Jack. Never.’

‘Never,’ Jack said solemnly.

Cardinal Ritter had been rooted to the spot beside the altar, a policeman guarding him. Suddenly there was a commotion as the gunman on the floor regained consciousness and grabbed the leg of the policeman guarding him, before being kicked back. The other policeman swung round instinctively, taking his eye off his charge for a second. In that moment of inattention the cardinal lunged forward and grabbed the bronze cylinder, then stumbled with it towards the entrance to the Chapel of St Vartan. ‘I have it now,’ he said. ‘I will destroy it. You will never know what it contains.’

‘Wrong again.’ Jack reached into his bag, and carefully pulled out another cylinder, a marble one, the cylinder he had taken from the underwater chamber only twenty minutes before, from the place where Everett had hidden it in 1918. ‘What you’ve got there is a bronze cylinder from a tomb in London. A very nice artefact, remarkable really. Probably late Iron Age. And it’s empty, by the way.’

The cardinal snarled, and tore the lid off the cylinder, peering inside. He swayed, then seemed frozen to the spot. Jack passed the stone cylinder to Costas, caught his eye, then launched himself forward. In an instant he had the cardinal in a headlock, forcing his right arm behind his back and pushing it up until the man bellowed in pain. Jack was tempted to squeeze the headlock fractionally tighter, to jerk upwards, to hear the crack. But it was too easy, too quick, and there was an off-chance the police interrogation might work. He relented slightly, keeping the man’s arm pinned with one hand, and took the bronze cylinder off him, placing it back beside the altar. Then he pushed the cardinal’s arm up again until he whimpered in pain. Jack held him like a vice, and pressed himself close behind Ritter’s left ear. He could smell the sweat, the fear.

‘You see?’ Jack whispered, steering the cardinal’s head in the direction of the press release on the laptop screen, and then pushing his face close to the precious cylinder in Costas’ hands. ‘You of all people should know, Eminence. A preacher of the Holy Gospels. The power of the written word.’

T
he next morning they crammed into a four-wheel-drive Toyota, and Helena drove them up the great rift of the Jordan Valley from Jerusalem towards the Sea of Galilee. Costas and Jack were sitting beside Helena, and Morgan, Maria and Jeremy were in the back. Maria and Jeremy had joined them straight from Tel Aviv airport. Jack had called them immediately after coming out of the Holy Sepulchre the day before. He knew that much of his anxiety about their safety could now be dispelled, but it was still a huge relief to have them alongside. Hiebermeyer was another matter entirely. The world’s press corps seemed to have converged on him in Naples, and he had refused to budge. Jack knew he would be relishing every moment, but it was also a way of deflecting press attention from their activities in Israel. They still had one final act to play out, a final folding-back of history to the event that had led them on one of the most extraordinary quests of Jack’s career.