“His mobile’s off. He’s knows they were using it to track him. He won’t turn it on again. And he won’t check in because he knows we must have turned him over to Six.”
“Like I said, I don’t care how you do it. Be creative,” he gave the young man a reassuring nod. “That’s why I hired you, Jude. To do the impossible.”
13 The Path of Mars
Rome—0235 Local (0135 UTC)
It took just an hour and forty minutes for them to travel from London to Rome.
It took longer for Frost’s man to deliver quality documentation than it did to fly. The forgeries were good. They had the bio-imprint stuff, all they needed was a photo for the facial recognition scanners and even that didn’t take more than a couple of hours to pull together.
Four hours after emerging from the ancient burial warren underneath Holywell Hill, they were in Rome.
As the plane touched down at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, Frost found himself wondering how long it had taken Labienus to make the same journey. A damn sight longer was the only answer he could come up with.
Lili would probably know, but Frost didn’t feel like asking her.
He was tired beyond belief, and under a layer of gauze bandages, his arm was throbbing in time with his heartbeat. The physical stress was nothing compared with the looming uncertainty about what was really going on and just what the Hell he was getting himself into. He’d been compromised—cut loose from Nonesuch. He couldn’t believe they’d abandon him. But he could well believe they’d have to protect themselves—and probably him in the process, by letting him run. That was the only thing that made sense. Which didn’t change anything. He was on his own. The only people he trusted were back in London. If he survived the night and somehow succeeded in finding the Crocea Mors, then what?
Frost couldn’t think about that right now.
One of the core tenets of his SAS training was focus on the immediate goals. Anything else ran the risk of letting the enormity of the big picture overwhelm and paralyze. So right now his world was reduced to the sword.
A Fiat 500 waited for them in the rental car pick-up area.
Lili, citing her experience as a one-time resident of the mad Italian metropolis—and more than passingly familiar with the crazy one-way system, the narrow cuts between buildings too tight to be called roads, the endless darting and weaving kids on their Piagios - suggested that she be allowed to drive. Frost was in no mood to argue the point, and didn’t care about calling shotgun, so he took the rear seat, where he could stretch his legs out and, with any luck, catch a few more minutes of downtime before the next phase of Denison’s crazy treasure hunt got underway.
The ride from the airport, which was situated on the Mediterranean coast, into the city proper took closer to an hour than the promised half an hour, time which, for Frost at least, passed in the blink of an eye.
“Mausoleo di Augusto,” Lili announced, startling Frost out of his shallow sleep. “The Mausoleum of Augustus.”
He lifted his head and peered out the window, but there was little to see.
Like any city, Rome never went completely dark or quiet, but at three in the morning, it was about as restful as it ever got. Although the area behind them was ablaze with artificial light, the foreground, illuminated by the Fiat’s headlights, showed only stacked bricks and a scattering of trees.
“Augustus’ tomb?” Denison asked. “You think the sword might be buried with him?”
She shook her head. “The mausoleum was a monument commissioned by Augustus himself, and was meant to hold not only his remains, but those of the imperial family and other nobles. It was a common practice for kings to build their own tombs while they were still alive. But unlike many other cultures of the day, the Romans practiced cremation and did not bury their dead with grave goods. The mausoleum was intended to be only a repository for the ashes of Augustus and his family, and of course, a monument to his greatness.
“However, in the year 410, armies under Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome and stole the golden urn containing Augustus’ ashes, so it is no longer the last resting place of Rome’s first emperor. If the Crocea Mors had been there with Augustus, it would have been pillaged as well.”
“Great. So we’ve just flown a thousand miles in the middle of the night to a pillaged tomb? Explain it to me. Please. Because I’m bloody tired.” Frost rubbed his face. He wasn’t lying. He was bone tired.
“The mausoleum has other secrets.” She opened the door. “Come. I will show you.”
Lili led them past a row of trees and up a shadow-shrouded gravel path that ran alongside the remains of a crumbling masonry wall. They finally arrived at a wrought iron gate that blocked entry to the other side of the wall. Lili switched on her Mini-MagLite LED torch. They had each purchased one at the airport gift shop, expecting to do most of their hunting in the dark. They were better prepared than they had been at Saint Albans.
Frost would have preferred something with a little more offensive capability; he’d been forced to leave his Browning behind. There was no way he could have got it through customs, and he didn’t have a carry permit or any sort of permission under his false ID. He didn’t like the fact that the killers would be able to pick up their trail again and he would be as good as naked in front of them. But he didn’t have a choice.
“We will need to climb over the gate,” Lili said, gesturing with her torch. The light darted up the wrought iron and back down again.
“Maybe we should try this in the morning,” Denison offered.
She shook her head. “The site was closed to the public years ago. We’ll only attract more attention if we do this in the daytime.” Without further explanation, she worked her foot into the space between the bars of the gate and pulled herself up and over the top in one smooth movement. Frost was impressed, but didn’t say anything.
With a shrug directed at Frost, Denison followed her lead, but needed Frost to cup his hands and boost him up over the top. As soon as he was over, Frost himself clambered onto the gate. His ascent took longer than the others because of his arm, but even so the gate posed no great hardship. In a few seconds he was following Lili and Denison up the stone steps leading into the mausoleum.
The stairs fed into an impossibly tight corridor that, after Frost turned slightly sideways to squeeze through, led through an enclosed building—the mausoleum itself—within an open circular courtyard. Frost could see scattered stones in the glow of Lili’s light but little else. She moved unhesitatingly into the centre of the courtyard where another circular structure stood. She slipped into another narrow passageway—which forced Frost to remember that two thousand years ago Romans were not exactly giants. The passage was framed by an arched opening. She shone her light on an enormous decorative column in the centre of the room, revealing a small enclosure in the very heart of it.
“Augustus’ urn was kept there,” she explained. “After the Visigoths raided the monument, it was for a time converted into a castle, but like so much else during the Middle Ages, it fell into ruin. In the 1930s, Mussolini, believing himself to be Augustus reborn, began restoring the site. That is when this was discovered.”
She circled around the column reaching a point that was almost directly opposite the funerary room, and with her torch tucked under one arm, pressed her palms flat against the stone surface. There was a gentle scraping noise, and then a section of the column began to move, sliding inward, exposing an opening about a metre in diameter and half as deep.
“Now I wasn’t expecting that,” Frost said.
Lili ignored him and squeezed through the narrow opening. Denison produced his own MagLite and followed her inside, leaving Frost to bring up the rear.
“Did I mention that I really don’t like confined spaces?”
No one answered him.
Just beyond the concealed door, a set of steps had been cut into the volcanic rock that formed the foundation of the mausoleum.
The descending
passage was cramped. Again Frost was forced to turn sideways, but this time he had to duck, as well, to avoid cracking his skull off the ceiling. Romans were also short, he realised. The scene felt like a replay of the misadventure under Holywell Hill, but unlike that ancient barrow, this place had not simply been sealed up and forgotten. Lili certainly seemed to know her way around, and for some reason the realisation didn’t put his mind at ease. But then, he was by nature a suspicious soul.
He followed their lights down.
And down.
After about a hundred steps, the passage flattened out and continued in a straight line leading Frost thought, assuming he was still oriented correctly, to the southwest. The walls were damp to the touch and the air was musty. It had that old smell of air that wasn’t breathed very often. Frost recalled that they had crossed the Tiber River shortly before reaching the mausoleum. The chamber was almost certainly below the water table. During heavy rains, the passage was probably flooded. So where did the water drain to? He could make out the curve of the arched ceiling overhead in the glow of the handheld lights, but little else.
Then to his surprise, they reached an intersecting passage.
Lili kept going straight.
Another fifty metres further on, she turned left at a second intersection.
Frost kept the twists and turns in his mind.
He wanted his exit strategy in place.
The narrow tunnel forced them to move single file and made conversation impossible—not that anyone was talking. Frost had only the glow of his companions’ torches, what little of it that wasn’t blocked by their silhouettes, to guide him. Step by step further into the dank tunnel his sense of unease increased.
In Saint Albans, they’d had Denison’s geophys map, incomplete as it was, to show the way. Here they had nothing. Lili had told them a story and led them into the dark. She knew her way around this subterranean labyrinth with a level of familiarity that could only come with a lot of time spent down here, but that didn’t make him feel any better about following her. If the Crocea Mors was here, in a place that Lili obviously knew, why hadn’t she recognised it from the start? These questions echoed through Frost’s mind as he trudged on in solitary silence wishing he still had the Browning.
Lili navigated through several more turns, which grew progressively tighter until they were moving in near-absolute darkness, following their way with their hands, until with unexpected abruptness, they emerged into a large circular chamber which likewise had been cut from the volcanic rock that formed Rome’s foundation.
Stairs had been carved into the wall, spiralling around the chamber and ascending into the gloom overhead, but Lili’s objective was in the centre of the room: a series of round platforms, each more than a metre high, rose in tiers, culminating in a dais that towered more than twenty metres above their heads.
“We now are beneath the ruins of the Temple of Mars Ultor,” she said, reverently. This, finally, was a holy place she had respect for, he realised. She climbed up to the dais. “Mars the Avenger. The temple was built to commemorate Augustus’ victory over the assassins of Julius Caesar, as well as his recovery of battle standards lost in the war with the Parthians.
“This room is the sacellum where those standards and the other sacred relics of Mars were kept when not on display. Augustus’ mausoleum lies on the northern edge of the Campus Martius—the Field of Mars—where in the days of the Republic, the legions would assemble. When he commissioned the mausoleum, Augustus also ordered the creation of an underground passage that would connect the temple to the Field of Mars.”
Denison gazed up at Lili in open admiration, but Frost’s instincts wouldn’t shut up. Something was off about the whole thing. It was a charade. He drew close to his old friend. “Something’s wrong here.”
Denison looked back blankly.
“This isn’t like the tombs at Saint Albans,” Frost whispered. “This place has been used...recently.”
Lili must have overheard his whisper. “The Path of Mars and this treasure vault are not well known, but neither are they a guarded secret.”
“If it’s so well known, then how can anything of value be left unfound? I’m not buying it.”
She shrugged. “Come up and have a look for yourself.”
Denison immediately clambered onto the high platform. Frost watched him go. There was nothing he could do to protect the man from twenty metres below him. With a sigh of resignation, he followed.
A large round structure, like a table or altar, occupied the centre of the dais. The top surface was flat, but a pattern of lines, like spokes of a wheel—twelve in all—radiated from a circle cut into the stone.
Lili shone her light onto the circle.
“A bronze statue of Mars the Avenger once stood here, standing guard over the sacred relics.”
“And the Crocea Mors was one of those relics?” Denison supposed.
“In the myths of Rome, Mars wielded a spear. You are familiar with his ancient symbol? A circle with an upraised spear point—it is also a universal symbol for the male gender.”
“I thought that was supposed to be a penis,” Frost muttered.
Lili ignored him. “In the time of Augustus, a spear said to be the Spear of Mars was kept in a shrine in the Regia, where the ancient kings of Rome lived. It was believed that, when the Republic faced great crisis, the spear would vibrate. It reportedly did so when Julius Caesar was assassinated. Following the victory of Augustus, the spear was moved to the new temple in the Forum, and safeguarded here. But there were other spears, too. The Flamen Martialis—the high priest of Mars—was attended to by the Salii—twelve young priests from patrician families, who would dress as warriors to perform the rituals of worship during the festival month of March—named for the war god—and when the legions embarked on a campaign or returned victorious. As part of their ritual attire, they each carried a replica of that spear.”
Lili bent over the altar and gripped one of the wedged-shaped sections. With surprising ease, it slid back to reveal a void underneath. When she shone her light inside, it was reflected back in a glint of metal.
Denison, his eyes dancing in anticipation, took a step closer and with almost reverent deliberation, reached inside. When he withdrew his hand, his fingers were curled around a broad bladed spearhead, and his eager expression gave way to disappointment.
Lili leaned over the altar and began moving another of the wedge segments.
The opening was now large enough for Frost to see that the interior of the altar contained several of the Roman-style spears, their steel edges dulled by time. Most of them were immaculately restored.
“These don’t look like ancient weapons.”
“They were restored by a secret commission of historians and art experts in the 1930s,” Lili insisted, pushing back yet another section to reveal even more blades. “On the orders of Mussolini himself, and cared for ever since by a likeminded individuals dedicated to preserving the ways of the old gods. These are the ancient relics of Mars, used by the Salii in ancient Rome, and by their modern counterpart even to this day.”
“Some kind of Mars cult?” Frost made no effort to hide his sarcasm.
“In a word, yes.”
“And they just leave all this stuff here, where anyone can just wander in?”
“No one just wanders onto the Path of Mars,” Lili spoke with an unusual degree of confidence. “It isn’t exactly Via Cavour.”
“I don’t understand,” Denison said. “What does any of this have to do with the Crocea Mors?”
She looked at him like he was a child. “The worship of Mars reached its zenith under Augustus. Within a hundred years of his death, Venus had become the favoured deity. This may be attributable to the changing demographics of both the city population and of the army. You see, in addition to being the god of war, Mars was also an agricultural deity. In the early Republic the army was made up of citizens; they would plant their crops in the springtime, and then
assemble on the Campus Martius to fight for the glory of Rome. They would pray to Mars both for success in battle and for a bountiful harvest to be waiting for them at home. But as the empire grew, the old ways changed. The worship of Mars made little sense to most Romans, who were neither farmers nor legionaries. By the second century, both the worship of Mars and the use of the Augustine Forum went into decline.”
Lili paused, allowing the significance of what she’d just said sink in.
Frost wasn’t sure he understood.
“There is nothing in the historical record regarding the disposition of the relics from the Temple of Mars Ultor. Everything kept here—the battle standards, the Spear of Mars...and yes, perhaps even the Crocea Mors—simply vanished from history.”
Frost said nothing.
“You asked how I knew of this place; I’ll tell you. My thesis advisor brought me here to witness the rites of the Salii. I knew nothing of the sword’s origin then. The notion of it being Caesar’s blade... And then we discovered the reference to it in the palimpsest, I was sure the sword was in England, it made sense because it was where Caesar lost it. But if the sword was brought here, if it was kept with the other relics...then what happened to it?”
“Stolen,” Frost answered. “Surely? You mentioned some invasion? Maybe they found this place, too? Possible?”
She shook her head. “No. If they had, history would have remembered it. You sack your enemy and rob their most sacred treasures, you ram it home, you glory in it. You let the world know. So no, if those relics came back here, then I think those relics are still here. There must be secrets here that haven’t been uncovered. There must be.”
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