Gregg Loomis - The Julian secret

Probably not, he concluded. There was some small chance the thing was filled only with its normal contents, olive oil or wine, but-he considered that unlikely. There would be little point in storing the mundane in this very special place. More likely, the jug held something else, something that needed to be sealed off from air and light. Like some sort of documents. And it was, of course, documents that the Montsegur inscription had seemed to indicate had been removed to the… What was the wording the Latin professor had used? Palace of the One God?

Whatever the contents, there was no point in risking them here. Let the container be opened in a place where others would take the blame if damage was done. Der Fahrer would be delighted if Skorzeny's assumption were correct, if…

"Herr Sturmbahnfuhrer?" One of the men was bending over, peering into the space from which the amphora had been removed. "There appears to be another."

On hands and knees, Skorzeny scrambled to the opening, taking in the remaining contents. Sure enough, a second container, identical to the first, was clearly visible now that the other one had been removed.

This presented a problem: The box the two regular army men had carried in was barely large enough to hold the first. Orders mandated discretion, and carrying a man-sized, ancient Greek amphora out of the Vatican was not going to be accomplished without notice. He might as well leave with the drum and bugle corps so beloved by the party playing "The Horst Wessel Song."

Machts nichts; didn't really matter. In a day or so, a week at most, Pius XII would be in German custody as hostage for all Vatican treasure, including the remaining clay jar.

Vatican City

Below St. Peter's Basilica

The present

This time, Lang had known what to expect. He spread a plastic sheet on the dirt before kneeling in front of the altered column. He switched on the fluoroscope and, once again, was astounded by how quickly the purple light made obliterated letters jump into view.

"Accusatio… rebellis… " Pretty much the same diatribe as he had seen at Montsegur, except… He moved the light slightly. Except supposedly the very indictment itself was contained inside.

What did that have to do with whatever Skorzeny had wanted?

He was about to find out. Standing, he took two steps back, playing the flashlight over the column. He could see now that the spot he had noted earlier was only the bottom part of a larger segment. A section almost five by three feet had been cut out of the pillar and replaced, presumably to hide something inside. Taking the short crowbar from underneath his cassock, he was surprised at how easily it fitted between the new and old stone. Almost as if someone had pried it open since Julian had sealed it sixteen centuries ago. Maybe someone had, someone like Skorzeny.

On second thought, there wasn't a lot of "maybe" to it. The picture on Don Huff's CD showed" the German in front of the Vatican. Unlikely he had come here as a mere tourist.

What if there was nothing here, what if whatever clue he was seeking was gone? What if…?

The last question went unfinished as he put the iron bar down, turned off his flashlight, and listened. He was greeted by overpowering silence, an absence of sound that is a sound within itself, just as white, an absence of color, is itself a color.

What had he heard? He was unsure. Another rat, scurrying about what had been his ancestors' exclusive domain? No, something more substantial than that.

But what?

He counted off a full minute, then another and another. Could he have simply overheard part of a tour of the necropolis on the other side of the plexiglass? Possible, but he thought he 'remembered a sign announcing that the office through which those excursions began closed for the day at six.

He recalled the old Gypsy woman he had almost struck in the darkness of an alley, the one who had sought no more than a few euros. The paranoia that became the constant companion of all Agency personnel had almost cost that crone dearly. Could the same thing be happening again?

He looked around the inky darkness. Alone, in the permanent midnight of an ancient burial ground, by stealth rather than by right. Anxiety could not find a more fertile breeding ground.

Besides, who would be here at night?

No one but the spirits of Romans dead for millennia.

And they didn't employ magical curses for those without coins to give them.

Probably didn't pick pockets, either.

Switching the light back on, he returned to prying the stone loose from the base of the pillar. With the gravelly crunch of grit grinding grit, the rock fell out of its socket. Lang bent down, spraying the hole with light.

He had stayed in cheap hotels that had smaller closets.

But never one that came with a large amphora.

The Greek jar loomed out of the shadows with a suddenness that startled him. He reached for it before freezing in midgrasp. He stepped back, surveying the entire opening. In front of the vessel he was looking at was an impression in the dirt, a circle that could have been made by a similar container.

But if so, where was it? If Skorzeny had found the two of them, why would he take only one? Only one way available to answer the questions that kept bubbling tip in his mind: See what's inside.

He tipped the jar over slightly to examine its gracefully slender neck and rimmed top. Sealed with wax, wax bearing some sort of insignia. The imperial crest of Julian? He rocked it back and forth. Were it not for the fact the thing was sealed, its lack of weight would have made him guess it empty. But people did not close up empty containers.

Perhaps the contents had drained out or evaporated. He rolled the jar in a rough circle, finding no cracks or holes. Whatever had been put in there was still there. He laid the large urn on its side and fished under his cassock for a pocketknife, which he found and opened. The wax had had a long time to dry and crack. It yielded quickly, giving off an odor of dust, long-dead mold, and faint rot. If Lang had ever wondered how eternity smelled, he now knew. Shining the light into a darkness even more intense than that around. him, Lang saw something wrapped in what looked like a shroud, a roll of old, dusty linen. He stuck the light between his. teeth, leaving one hand free to prevent the amphora from rolling down the slope and the other to reach inside.

It was like touching cobwebs. He saw, rather than felt, the cloth dissolve at his fingertips. Light still in his mouth, he stood and lifted the bottom of the jar, gently shaking its contents onto the ground.

The whitish cloth looked as though it were melting as it touched the dirt. Underneath was more robust material, a scroll still wrapped around two wooden sticks, the sort of thing large enough to be seen in the hands of an official by a multitude gathered to hear some ancient proclamation. The part exposed to light was written on what Lang guessed was vellum or parchment. Large patches were missing, holes that consumed whole sentences. Still, Lang knew he was lucky. Other documents of like age, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the' Oxyrhynchus Papyri, had been discovered sealed in jars but had been in fifty thousand or more crumbs that scholars had been piecing together for half a century. Wary of touching a manuscript so old, he leaned down on hands and knees to see what he might have found. The text was in Latin, Hebrew, and a script he did not recognize, most likely Aramaic, the pastoral tongue common to the peoples of the Middle East at the time of Christ.

He started to put the scroll back into the jar, then stopped. He knew he should do whatever seemed necessary to preserve such an ancient and possibly historically significant writing, the only known contemporaneous evidence Christ had even existed. He was aware that, should his harming of it become known, he would be excoriated by academic, archaeologist, and historian alike.