The Last Gospel (53 page)

Jack gave a tired smile, then gently patted his khaki bag. ‘Come on. There’s one final place we need to go.’

 

Half an hour later they stood on the edge of the mudflats on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was now early evening, and the shadows had begun to steal up behind them and advance across the flats. In the distance the water still sparkled, and Jack remembered the strange pixillation he had sensed in the sky off Sicily the week before, as if his eyes were being drawn to the parts rather than the whole, the view too blinding to comprehend. Now, clutching his bag, he felt the same thrill of anticipation he had felt then, the knowledge that he was on the cusp of another extraordinary revelation, a promise that had brought them to the place where the treasure in Jack’s hands had begun its journey almost two thousand years before. He knew with utter conviction that Claudius had stood at this spot, that he too had gazed at the distant shoreline of the Golan Heights, felt the allure of the east. He wondered whether Claudius had sensed the disquiet too, the lurking danger of this age-old faultline between east and west, known the calm of the sea was an illusion like the eye of a storm.

As Jack watched, the sun set lower behind them and the scene became coherent in his mind again, more like a painting by Turner than by Seurat, the sparkles smudging together into pastel hues of blue and orange. He took a deep breath, motioned to the others, and they began to pick their way on to the mudflats, through a tangle of twigs that had been blown up over the shoreline like tumbleweed.

‘
Ziziphus spina-crista
, if I’m not mistaken,’ Jeremy said. ‘Christ-thorn. It has an excellent fruit. You should try it some time.’

‘You sound just like Pliny the Elder,’ Maria said.

They walked on, Jack in the lead, the rest forming a ragged line over the flats. Jeremy splashed through the puddles and caught up to Jack, out of earshot of the others. ‘About Elizabeth, Jack. There’s one thing I didn’t mention.’

Jack kept on walking, but glanced at Jeremy. ‘Go on.’

‘Did you know she had a daughter?’

‘A daughter?’

‘She’s at school in New York, and lives with two of Elizabeth’s old friends, both university professors. Elizabeth didn’t want her brought up in Naples, with her own family. She kept her daughter secret from almost everyone. One of the other superintendency people told me, a man who seems to have been close to Elizabeth. He was very emotional.’

‘Does she know? The daughter, I mean?’

‘Elizabeth’s only been missing for two days, and she kept her daughter completely out of the loop about her life in Naples. But she tried to speak on the phone every few days. She’ll soon know something’s wrong.’

‘Can you put me in touch with this man?’ Jack said. ‘Can I get the daughter’s contact details?’

‘I’m there already, Jack,’ Jeremy said quietly. He passed over a slip of paper. ‘He’ll do it, but he said you should be the one.’

‘Why would he suggest me?’

‘He and Elizabeth had talked about you.’

They walked on in silence. Jack felt as if he were on a treadmill, the ground below his feet moving but the world around him stock-still, as if everything, the play he was in, were suddenly frozen in time, and only the path he could see in front of him had any significance. He began to speak, but caught his breath. When the words came out they sounded as if they came from another person.

‘How old is she?’

‘She’s fifteen, Jack.’

Jack swallowed hard. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he said quietly. Jeremy nodded, then stopped to join the others who were coming behind. Jack carried on walking, but his mind was fragmented, seeing images of Elizabeth over and over again, willing an anger that would not come, a rage against all the forces that had made this happen, against the man he had nearly killed the day before and all that he stood for. But instead all he could think about was the last fifteen years, and what he had done.

What he had missed
.

After ten minutes skirting the shallow mudpools they came to a raised patch about a hundred yards in front of the shoreline. It was a fishermen’s hard, a temporary landing area used during the drought, and was suffused with the odour of fish and old nets. In the centre a large rock lay deeply buried where it had been used as a mooring stone, a frayed old rope emerging from the mud in front and trailing off towards the shore. Jack pulled away some decayed netting and sat down, and the others did the same on two old railway sleepers which had clearly been dragged out for this purpose. Jack laid his bag on his lap, and they all looked out to sea, caught by the utter tranquillity of the scene. They watched as a man and a woman wandered languidly along the shoreline, the sheen of water on the mud making it look as if they were walking on water, like a mirage. Far away they could make out the fishing boats on the lake, the lights on their masts dotting the scene like a carpet of candles.

‘This shoreline was where Jesus spent some of his formative years,’ Helena said quietly. ‘In the Gospels, his sayings abound with metaphors of fishing and the sea. When he spoke of the red evening sky presaging a fine day, he was not being a prophet, but a sailor and a fisherman, someone who knew that dust in the air meant a dry day to follow.’

‘And people have come here to the Sea of Galilee seeking him ever since,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Early Christians came after the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the ones who created the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then pilgrims of the medieval world, from the British Isles, from the Holy Roman Empire, from Byzantium. Harald Hardrada was here, leading the Viking mercenaries of the Byzantine emperor’s bodyguard, bathing in the river Jordan. Then the Crusaders, riding on a tide of blood, thinking they had found the kingdom of heaven, only to see it collapse before their eyes as the Arab armies rolled in from the east.’

‘I bet this place hasn’t changed much, though,’ Costas said, skipping a pebble along a shallow pool, then eyeing Jack. ‘Are you going to show us what you’ve got?’ Jack nodded absently, then looked back to where he had been staring at the man and the woman walking off in the distance by the shoreline.

‘Did you know Mark Twain was here?’ Jeremy asked.

‘Come again?’ Costas said, turning to him.

‘Mark Twain, the writer. In 1867, one of the first American tourists in the Holy Land.’

‘I memorized his words,’ Helena said. ‘I read them last time I was here, and they made a real impression on me. “Night is the time to see Galilee, when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.”’

‘There were others like him,’ Jack said, clearing his throat and taking a deep breath. He was still reeling from Jeremy’s news, and had been unable to suppress the bleakness he felt about Elizabeth’s disappearance, a feeling of culpability he knew was irrational. What had happened to her had been set in train the day she was born. He had seen it in her eyes when they were together all those years ago, only he had seen it then as something else. And yet, as he had watched the shoreline, the boats on the horizon, he had suddenly felt the weight lifted from him, a sense of peace he had never known before. Part of him seemed to accept Jeremy’s news as if he had known it all along. He wiped his hand over his eyes, then looked at Costas, who had been watching him closely. He clutched the slip of paper from Jeremy tight in his hand. In the face of despair, there was huge yearning, and an overwhelming responsibility. And he still had to hope that Elizabeth was alive after all, that they had stopped Ritter and his henchmen in time.

‘There were others who believed the stories in the Bible were not just allegory and fable,’ Jack said. ‘It was the time when archaeology came of age, when Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans proved the reality of the Trojan Wars and the Greek Bronze Age. Ten years after Mark Twain, Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener, Royal Engineers, cut his teeth in Galilee with the Survey of Palestine, before becoming Britain’s greatest war leader. And then T. E. Lawrence came here studying Crusader castles, before returning as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the Arab legion over those hills towards Damascus. Great movements of history sweep past this place, and the biggest fracture line between the eastern and western worlds runs through here along the Jordan valley. But Galilee has so often been an eddy pool of history, a place where the individual can stand out.’

‘People who came here with the future ahead of them, on the cusp of greatness,’ Maria murmured.

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small snap-lid box. He opened it and took out two coins. He held them up, one in each hand, letting the fading sunlight catch the portraits, the features accentuated by shadow as he slowly moved them from side to side.

‘It looks to me as if you’ve been borrowing again, Jack,’ Costas said quietly, still peering intently at his friend. ‘It’s a slippery slope to becoming a treasure-hunter, you know. I always wondered when you’d cross the line.’

Jack flashed him a smile, but kept silent, staring at the faces on the coins. He had needed to view them one last time, to reach out and touch them before opening up his bag and revealing what they had all come here to see. The coin on the left was a tetradrachm of Herod Agrippa, the one that Helena and Yereva had found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The portrait was worn, but it showed a thick-set, bullish face, the image of a fighter more than a thinker, but with large, sensitive eyes. It was idealized in the eastern tradition, a Hercules or an Alexander more than Herod Agrippa. He wore a laurel diadem, normally only seen on coins of Roman emperors. The man on the other coin was wearing a diadem too, but this time rightly so. It was the sestertius of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum. Jack saw Claudius as he had imagined him sitting at his table in the villa, working with Narcissus and Pliny on his history of Britain, then standing before the tomb under London. He saw the full head of hair, the high forehead, the eyes set back and thoughtful, the pursed mouth. Not Claudius the cripple, not Claudius the fool, but Claudius the emperor at the height of his powers, an emperor who built aqueducts and harbours and brought the Roman world back from the brink of catastrophe, paving the way for the Christian west in centuries to come. Both coins showed men who had reached the pinnacle of their lives, a future they could scarcely have foreseen that day in AD 23 when they came here together as young men, beside the Sea of Galilee. Herod Agrippa, prince of the East. Claudius the god.

‘I wonder if they sensed the darkness ahead,’ Helena murmured.

‘What do you mean?’ Costas said.

Jack put away the coins, slipped the box back into his pocket, and then took out a swaddled package from his bag. The others watched him intently. ‘Herod Agrippa came from one of the most volatile dynasties of the east, and had grown up in Rome,’ he said. ‘He knew all about the fickle nature of power. Claudius was intimate with that too, and was also a historian. Even as early as AD 23 he would have seen the seeds of decay in the reign of Tiberius. And the one they met here, the fisherman from Nazareth, may have lived his life in Galilee away from the momentous events of history, but he may have known what lay ahead. When Claudius made his final visit to Britain to hide his treasure, he was doing it to last beyond Rome. And when Everett came to Jerusalem in 1917, he was doing the same. His world was one of terrible darkness, closer to apocalypse than Claudius could ever have imagined. And both men knew how the fickle winds of history might snatch away their prize.’

Jack removed the bubblewrap from the object in his hands and revealed a small stone cylinder. There was a murmur of excitement from the others, and both Helena and Morgan held their hands together as if in prayer. Jack held the cylinder out for Helena. ‘Will you break the seal?’

Helena made the sign of the cross and took the cylinder from Jack’s hands. Slowly, carefully, she twisted the lid. It came away easily, breaking the blackened resinous material that had sealed the join. She handed it back to Jack, who finished removing the lid. The others crowded round, Maria and Jeremy kneeling in front and Costas and Morgan peering over Jack’s shoulder. There was another gasp as they saw what was inside. It was a scroll, brown with age but apparently intact, still wound round a wooden rod.

‘The cylinder was airtight,’ Jack breathed. ‘Thank God for that.’ He reached in and held the edge of the scroll between two fingers, gently feeling it. ‘It’s still supple. There’s some kind of preservative on it, a waxy material.’

‘Clever old Claudius,’ Maria murmured.

‘Clever old Pliny, you mean,’ Jeremy said. ‘I bet that’s who Claudius learned it from.’

They were silent, and all Jack could hear was a distant knocking sound, and a faint whisper of breeze from the west. He held his breath. He drew out the scroll, and put the cylinder on his lap. There was no writing to be seen, just the brown surface of the papyrus. He held the scroll up so it was caught in the remaining sunlight that shone over the hills behind them. Carefully, without a word, he unrolled a few centimetres, peering closely at the surface as it was revealed.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured.

‘Got something?’ Costas said.

‘Look at the cross-layering, where the strips of papyrus have been laid. You can see it where the light shines through. This is first-grade paper, exactly the same as the papyrus sheet we found on Claudius’ desk in Herculaneum. And there it is.’ His voice was hushed. ‘I can see it.’

‘What?’

‘Writing. There. Look.’ Jack slowly unrolled the papyrus. First one line was revealed, then another. He unravelled the entire scroll, and they could see about twenty lines. Jack’s heart was racing. The ink was black, almost jet-black, sealed in by the preservative wax. The writing was continuous, without word breaks or punctuation, in the ancient fashion. ‘It’s Greek,’ he whispered. ‘It’s written in Greek.’