by Tom Fox
‘But there was nothing terribly unusual about the four lines I translated,’ Ben said, sitting a little taller. ‘I remember working over the glyphs. They appeared to be the introduction to some sort of prophetic oracle – a series of predictions, woes, that sort of thing. Hardly out of the ordinary for an ancient document emerging from a myth-laden culture.’
‘Once you sent back your translation of those initial lines,’ Cardinal Forte said, his jowls bobbing as he nodded his head, ‘we came to the same conclusion. A newly discovered collection of prophetic utterances, from a quarter of antiquity that produced them like snow from heaven. Interesting for the scholars in due course, but hardly something cataclysmic to the reputation of the Church or the broad understanding of history. And your lack of criticism of the text,’ he added, ‘led us to believe it was authentic Akkadian. I’m told it’s a difficult language to forge.’
‘Extremely,’ Ben confirmed, ‘since so few people know it well enough to use it creatively, and since the whole corpus of Akkadian literature is essentially known.’
‘Your work reassured us. We released the full imagery to our various scholarly offices, to let the tablet go through the normal process of cataloguing and registering, then be released to the scholarly world in due course.’ He paused. ‘I only wish we’d sat on it a little longer, now. Once that process starts, so many hands get involved that it’s hard to stop. I’m told the imagery was published on some scholarly website earlier today.’
‘Why call it off?’ Angelina asked. The Cardinal, however, did not look at her. Instead, he kept his eyes bolted on to Ben’s.
‘Dr Verdyx, do you remember what those first lines you translated were?’
Ben pondered only a second, his memory refreshed by the photograph in his hands. ‘Something about a plague of death coming upon whoever would discover the prophecy. That sort of thing. Typical introductory remarks to this kind of document.’
‘Correct,’ the Cardinal confirmed. ‘More precisely, your translation read . . .’ He reached into a deep pocket in his cassock and pulled out a folded piece of paper which he opened and held at eye level. ‘“He who lays claim and discovers these words shall die swiftly and most terribly.” Does that sound familiar?’
Ben nodded in the affirmative, and Angelina peered down at the photograph as the Cardinal read. Translating Akkadian on the fly wasn’t really a skill that any scholar possessed, but as the words were read they appeared to match the impressions she could see in the clay’s first lines.
‘Those were the words that ultimately brought all this to my attention,’ Major Hans Heinrich reintroduced himself into the conversation.
‘I . . . I don’t understand,’ Ben confessed, passing his gaze back and forth between the Cardinal and the Guardsman.
‘The words may have felt standard when you translated them,’ Heinrich continued, ‘but three days later, the prediction, or prophecy, or call it whatever you want, that you interpreted from that tablet – it came true.’
Neither Ben nor Angelina had the faintest idea how to respond. Too much new information was passing through their minds to process it all, and for a few seconds they simply gaped in silence.
It was Angelina who finally burst the bubble.
‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’ she asked. She found she felt more comfortable addressing Heinrich than Forte. Her antipathy towards religion harboured a more refined dislike of the male-centric clergy that ruled it, and though the Cardinal had been nothing other than respectful and businesslike since he’d entered the room, he was still an embodiment of so much that Angelina despised. ‘Prophecies on ancient clay tablets don’t just “come true”.’
‘That is precisely what Cardinal Forte thought,’ Heinrich answered with an incline of deference towards his superior, ‘and why he passed the text to us.’
‘I may be a believer,’ Forte inserted, ‘but I consider scepticism a healthy dimension of faith. Questions should come before accepting answers.’
‘And when a man dies,’ Heinrich continued, ‘we all become sceptics. The man who discovered the tablet, the Manuel Herrero I spoke about before, died four days and eleven hours after he first found the tablet underground. The precise cause of death, some sort of virulent pathogen, is still undetermined. But suffice it to say that it was, in the words of your translation, Dr Verdyx, both “swift” and “most terrible”.’
Ben sat fixed in his chair, his face immobile.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Heinrich continued, ‘and His Excellency is also right: prophecies from the ancient world are like water in the sea. They’re everywhere you look. But when one is unearthed and its first foretelling “comes true”, to my mind that smacks of fraud, not history. All the more so when it amounts to a prediction of what very well may be murder.’
Heinrich allowed his pace to slow slightly. His gaze arced sternly between Ben and Angelina.
‘It was the moment that we found out about Herrero’s death that the two of you became suspects.’
17
Twenty-six days earlier
Hospital Fatebenefratelli
Central Rome
‘Is he gone?’
The question sounded surprisingly cautious, almost hesitant. For a moment the tenor surprised the man called Bartolomeo, as Emil Durré always seemed in eminent control. Yet Bartolomeo had to remind himself that in all the years of Emil’s time on this planet, his boss had never taken the life of another, even by proxy. He could be forgiven for suffering a pause at the realisation that the three words of his question – assuming they were answered the way he expected – would forever change that.
‘So I’ve been told.’ Bartolomeo replied calmly through the tinny telephone line, his voice redolent with a practised, grief-tinged sobriety.
It was the message his boss was waiting for. Unambiguous. Arranged in advance.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ Emil answered, continuing the scripted dialogue. Whether it was relief in his voice, or anxiety, was difficult to determine. ‘I hear he was a good fellow.’
Bartolomeo knew that Emil desperately wanted to say more. He was a man of theatrical ideals, who routinely had to be talked down from the ledge of far too showy and revealing extravagances. He’d been plotting the course that led to this moment, and to everything that was to come, for months, and he wanted the actual events to have – magnitude.
This was the day it all started to come together.
But a moment later, the line went dead at Bartolomeo’s ear. They had finished their script. There was nothing more to say. There would certainly be no pleasantries or small talk. Bartolomeo’s own name had never been uttered over a phone line between them, and he would never dream of using his employer’s given name, even in person. There was a trust that emerged from that dependability, a trust Bartolomeo had no intention of diminishing.
Emil had given him one of the most important tasks in the whole of the operation. There were many players, all with significant parts to call their own. But Emil had trusted Bartolomeo with ensuring that the tablet was discovered at the right time, and that its discoverer would not survive.
For two weeks prior to its ‘unearthing’, Bartolomeo had lodged himself in the necessary surroundings, enrolling as a temporary labourer with Manuel Herrero’s civic excavation and survey unit. He’d had a background in building works before he’d gone illegitimate, so it hadn’t been a difficult role to secure, and with his credentials firmed up he’d been able to be present on the work site with Herrero day after day. Perfectly placed to slip the necessary quantity of the white, tasteless powder into his disposable coffee cup on the morning that had been set as discovery day. To take the crumpled cup with him after its contents had been drunk, shoved into a pocket and removed from the site so that it would never be found.
The pathogen, they had been told, would take only days to destroy the man’s body, and the effects would start to become apparent almost immediately. Both elements –
its prompt uptake as well as the arduous torture – were part of the appeal.
Curses, after all, are never meant to be gentle.
At Emil’s direction, Bartolomeo had watched over the unfortunate man, discreetly, over the four days since. He’d ‘found’ the tablet, which had been placed at just the right point in the dig to ensure it would be located, and all had gone according to plan after. It was a rather miserable thing to have to do to another human being, yes. The pathogen ate away at his organs with fierce efficiency, causing blood to drip from his eyes and ears and foamy spittle to flow from his mouth. Cinematic really, and dreadful.
But that which was coming was so immeasurably greater than the value of his singular life, so incomprehensibly wonderful, that there could be no hesitation. The tablet had, as they’d ensured, been found. It predicted the death of its discoverer – and so there had been no other choice.
Besides, hadn’t it long ago been said that it was, from time to time, expedient that one man should die for the people?
Emil had quoted the saying to him as they’d concocted this segment of their plan. Attributed it to Jesus, or Pilate, or someone from the Bible. Bartolomeo, despite his biblical name, had never been a churchgoer and so couldn’t be sure. But he liked the saying.
He doubted it would be the last time he used it.
18
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
‘What’s that supposed to mean, we’re suspects?’ Angelina was incredulous. Nothing about her day had made sense thus far – from the shootings to the chase, to her capture or to the revelation of the tablet and its discoverer’s sorry fate. But the idea that she or Ben Verdyx could be suspects in the man’s death was the most preposterous thing she’d heard yet.
‘It was a natural conclusion to draw,’ Major Heinrich answered calmly. ‘We weren’t about to take the line that Herrero’s death was the result of some prophetically induced plague, however convenient the text’s prediction might make it. Which means that his death was orchestrated, somehow, with the discovery of that tablet.’ He wagged an accusing finger towards the photograph that was still in Angelina’s grip.
‘And apart from Dr Verdyx here,’ Cardinal Forte interjected, ‘you, Dr Calla, are the only other person in Rome with expertise in the language of the hour.’
‘Akkadian,’ Angelina whispered out her beloved word. It suddenly had an unpleasant flavour, and sounded self-condemning.
Sometimes the things we love turn around to bite us.
The implication wasn’t unreasonable. How could someone orchestrate the death of another man – if, indeed, that’s what had happened – and tie it into a prophecy in the ancient script, without knowing the script itself? The fact that the tablet was a new discovery meant there were no existing translations that could be looked up in dusty library collections. Whoever had tied Manuel Herrero’s death to the prophecy of the tablet had to have known about its discovery, and known the language in which it was written.
‘So, you think we’re forgers.’ Even as the words came out of her mouth, Angelina wasn’t sure whether they were an accusation or an appeal. The thought was absurd. Repugnant.
‘That was our suspicion,’ Heinrich affirmed. For the first time, his military bearing struck Angelina as sharply as the angles of his face. In their usual dress the Swiss Guard looked like fluffy playthings of Renaissance memory, but if they were all cut like this beneath their costumes, they would be a decent human force indeed.
‘You keep using the past tense,’ Ben finally spoke. He’d remained distant to the exchange between Angelina and the others, interjecting only occasionally, and even this comment was spoken more to the air than to either Forte or Heinrich in particular. ‘Why is that?’
‘Things . . . things have changed,’ the Cardinal answered. He followed his words with a huff, and a nod to Heinrich, instructing the Guardsman to explain.
‘We thought we had you for sure this morning, once we saw the water go red,’ the Major continued. ‘We’d sent the remaining lines of the tablet’s text off to a linguistics expert at Tufts in the USA, so we knew the next prophecy it contained – the first in a series of plagues.’
Angelina looked back at the image. The runes she’d already translated glowed on the page. The river . . . will flow . . . with blood . . .
‘When that “prediction” came true, we knew we had concrete manipulation on our hands, and that one of the two of you – or perhaps both – had to be behind it. I assigned a team to each of you, covertly.’
‘You had us followed?’
‘Followed, tapped, and electronically surveilled, yes,’ Heinrich answered, plainly and with no suggestion that he felt any remorse whatsoever for what amounted to a massive invasion of their privacy. ‘Since the moment the water changed colour, our men have been with you.’
‘You couldn’t have, I don’t know, picked up a phone and called us?’ Now Angelina’s voice was deliberately harsh. ‘It’s not like I wouldn’t have been willing to talk to you.’
‘We didn’t want to let on that we knew anything about you. If you were plotting something, which it seemed clear you were, we wanted to learn as much about your actions and intentions as we could before revealing ourselves.’
The fuck you was back at the tip of Angelina’s tongue, but with immense effort she bit it into silence.
‘In the end, you can be grateful we were there,’ Heinrich said, noting her increasingly red colour. ‘It’s only because we were following you that we were there to see the attacks.’
With that, all Angelina’s interior protests halted. For an instant, she could hear the gunfire at the Ponte Sisto afresh, exploding in her ears. She could feel the shards of shattered stonework flying into her skin.
To her left, Ben looked equally pale.
‘You and Dr Verdyx were attacked almost simultaneously,’ Heinrich continued. His tone was now a shade gentler, broaching compassionate. ‘The gunshots came only seconds apart, in two parts of the city. A coordinated attack.’
‘The man in front of me . . . his head . . .’ Ben’s words blurted out the fragmentary anxieties of memory. ‘I’ve never seen a person die.’ His eyes rose to meet the Major’s. ‘There was a woman next to me when it started. She was shot, in the arm or shoulder, I think. Did she survive?’
‘I’m afraid the welfare of others was not my men’s priority,’ Heinrich answered, his voice back to cold efficiency. ‘They were there to watch you. The local police will have dealt with other casualties.’
Ben sagged in his chair, his gaze sinking into the floor.
Angelina eyed Heinrich, then the Cardinal. Both men were quiet, and where moments ago she’d felt only anger towards them – and to the cleric with special fervency – she realised she now felt the first flowerings of something different. Gratitude. It was, in a direct way, because of these two men and their suspicions of her, that Angelina was still alive.
‘But why would anyone have been shooting at us?’ she suddenly asked. ‘I’m just a tour guide. Dr Verdyx is an archivist.’
‘That’s simple,’ Heinrich answered. ‘It seems we’re not the only ones in Rome to know you’re the only two experts in Akkadian.’
19
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
For the first time since their capture, Angelina stood.
‘You’re going to have to do more than just hint that others know about us,’ she spoke accusingly to the Swiss Guardsman. ‘If others feel our scholarly interests for some reason give them cause to shoot at us, then I for one want more than a vague idea of who they are.’
‘I’m afraid that’s information we don’t know,’ Heinrich said flatly. ‘Until an hour or two ago, we were looking into you, not anyone else.’
‘Well, that’s a fucking comfort.’
The profanity escaped the stolid fetters of her usual propriety, and Angelina felt a sudden embarrassment, compounded by the fact that it had done so in the presence of a member of the Pope’s guard, step
s away from a cardinal. She scolded herself. You might not like the clergy, but rude is rude.
‘I’m sorry, I’m just—’
‘Don’t apologise, Dr Calla,’ Major Heinrich answered. ‘We’re as eager to find out who was after you as you are.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘We’ll have CCTV footage from the two regions of your attacks advanced to us from the Carabinieri within an hour or two. Something’s bound to show up on one of the cameras, and that will give us a starting point as far as the assaults go.’ Angelina noticed that when Heinrich talked about operations like this his demeanour became confident, at ease, as if this were the environment in which the man was the most comfortable. ‘We’ll start cross-referencing your phone records with any known third parties, which might give us another lead.’
Angelina looked to Ben, to see if he showed any signs of this all being as absurd to him as it felt to her, but he sat motionless on his chair, eyes once more fixed afar.
‘It would be helpful if you could liaise with my men,’ Heinrich continued, ‘to let them know whether you’ve had any contact with—’
The rest of his sentence never came. Instead, Heinrich halted abruptly, mid-phrase, his mouth still hanging open but his head suddenly tilting slightly aside. Only at that moment did Angelina notice the small wire dangling out of his left ear, barely visible along his neckline as it disappeared beneath his collar.