The First Apostle by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page B

whatever site they find the easiest to use or the fastest or most comprehensive.”
    “And the translation? Is this what the program provided?”
    “No, though it’s fairly close. The American site suggested ‘In this place or location the liars are concealed, ’ which is clumsy at best. My language specialist’s interpretation is much more elegant: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”
    “The Latin is clear enough,” Vertutti murmured. “ ‘Hic’ is obviously ‘here,’ and I would perhaps have expected ‘vatis mendacis’ —‘false prophets’—rather than ‘vanidici,’ but why ‘latitant’? Surely ‘occubant’ would have been more literal?”
    Mandino smiled slightly and extracted two photographs. “We anticipated that question, Eminence, and you would have been right if this inscription had been found at a grave site. ‘Occubant’ —‘buried’ or ‘resting in the grave’—would have been far more likely. But this inscription isn’t on a tombstone. It’s carved on a small oblong stone that’s part of the wall above a fireplace in a six-hundred-year-old converted farmhouse in the Monti Sabini region.”
    “What?” For the first time, Vertutti was shocked. “Let me see those pictures,” he instructed.
    Mandino passed them over and Vertutti studied them for a few moments. One was a close-up view of the inscription, and the other several stones over a large fireplace. “Then why,” he asked, “are you so certain this has anything at all to do with the Codex?”
    “I wasn’t at first, and that’s why I decided to investigate further. And that, I’m afraid, is when things went wrong.”
    “You’d better explain.”
    “The person who made this inquiry left their e-mail address—it’s one of the conditions of using this particular site—and that made tracing them a lot easier. We identified the house from which the request for the translation was made. It’s located a short distance off the road between Ponticelli and Scandriglia, and was bought last year by an English couple named Hampton.”
    “And then what did you do?” Vertutti demanded, fearing the worst.
    “I instructed my deputy to send two men to the house when we believed the owners would be away in Britain, but what we didn’t know was that Signora Hampton was still on the property. For some reason she hadn’t accompanied her husband. The men broke in and began searching for the source of the Latin phrase, and quickly located it carved into the stone above the fireplace. It had been covered in plaster that a team of builders are replacing and only part of the stone had been exposed. That section contained the inscription.
    “They’d been ordered to find the Latin phrase and anything else that might be relevant, and their first task was to check the entire stone for any other inscriptions. The men began chipping away the plaster but Signora Hampton heard them, and came down to investigate. When she saw what was happening she ran away. One of the men chased her, and in a scuffle on the stairs she fell against the banister rail and broke her neck. It was a simple accident.”
    This was even worse than Vertutti had expected. An innocent woman dead. “A simple accident?” he echoed. “Do you really expect me to believe that? I know the way your organization works. Are you sure she wasn’t pushed? Or even beaten to death?”
    Mandino smiled coldly. “I can only repeat what I’ve been told. We’ll never know what really happened in that house, but the woman would have had to die eventually. I understand that the provisions of the Sanction are unambiguous.”
    In the middle of the seventh century, Pope Vitalian had written the Codex by hand, not wishing to entrust his recommendations to even the most devoted of scribes. Down the centuries, the contents of the Codex had been known to only a handful of the most senior and trusted men in the Vatican, including the reigning pope. None had recorded any reservations about the