The Heretic Scroll Read online

  The Heretic Scroll

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue Outside Ottaviano The lower slopes of Vesuvius

  Chapter One I Herculaneum, Naples

  II Via Siracusa, Rome

  III Herculaneum Primary School

  Chapter Two I

  II

  III

  Chapter Three I

  Chapter Four I

  II

  Chapter Five I

  II

  III

  Chapter Six I

  II

  III

  Chapter Seven I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Eight I

  II

  Chapter Nine I

  II

  Chapter Ten I A lecture hall, Pompeii

  II

  III

  Chapter Eleven I

  II

  III

  III

  Chapter Twelve I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirteen I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Fourteen I

  II

  III

  Chapter Fifteen I

  II

  III

  Chapter Sixteen I

  II

  III

  Chapter Seventeen I

  II

  III

  Chapter Eighteen I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Nineteen I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Twenty I

  II

  III

  Chapter Twenty-One I

  II

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Two I

  II

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Three I

  II

  Chapter Twenty-Four I

  II

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Five I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Twenty-Six I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Twenty-Seven I

  II

  Chapter Twenty-Eight I

  II

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Nine I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Thirty I

  Chapter Thirty-One I

  II

  Chapter Thirty-Two I

  II

  Chapter Thirty-Three I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirty-Four I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirty-Five I

  II

  Chapter Thirty-Six I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirty-Seven I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirty-Eight I

  II

  III

  Chapter Thirty-Nine I

  II

  III

  Epilogue I Six weeks later

  II

  III

  Acknowledgements

  The Rossi & Nero Thrillers

  About the Author

  Also by Will Adams

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Mum

  Prologue

  Outside Ottaviano

  The lower slopes of Vesuvius

  Faustino Liri had nothing but contempt for men who wept. Particularly men of a certain age. This world was a septic tank filled to the chin with piss and shit. You waded through it as best you could until finally your strength gave out and you drowned. That was all there was to it. Anyone who hadn’t realised that by his age deserved the kicking that life gave them. Yet the tears flowed down his cheeks even so. They flowed like rainwater down these craggy mountain slopes after a storm, leaving them wet and glistening, while his chest ached like a heart attack and his shoulders humped helplessly with sobs.

  Three weeks old. That’s all Reuben had been when Faustino had picked him from his litter. He’d been a sickly pup, with a look of bitter sadness in his eyes that had mirrored exactly how Faustino himself had felt at that time, abandoned by his wife for his neighbour and best friend. He himself had nursed Reuben through his illness, spending more on vets than he could rightly afford, or any animal warranted. But his reward had been great indeed. His reward had been the most faithful companion a man could have asked for, and in truth the one great love of his life.

  He’d been dead at least a little while, judging by the number of flies that had settled on him, by his stiffness and the unnatural concavity of his chest. It must have happened last night. He liked to slip out in the darkness and have himself a little fun. Who could blame him for that? Faustino knelt beside him. He could see no trace of injury on this side, so he turned him over. Nothing there either. He hadn’t expected anything, for he’d known the truth the moment he’d seen him. This was poison. Exactly as Luca had threatened. Just because Reuben liked to go into their yard every so often, to romp around with their chickens. Of course he went in their yard to romp around with their chickens. He was a dog. That was what dogs did. If they didn’t like it, they should put up a fucking fence.

  He scooped Reuben up in his arms, to carry him back to his cramped and gloomy one-bedroomed farm cottage. He tried to hold him in as dignified a manner as he could, yet his head kept lolling even so. The dog was heavier than he’d realised, or maybe he was simply getting old. His arms and legs were spent by the time he finally got home. He laid him gently down by the wooden kennel he himself had built and contemplated him for a moment before covering him with the ragged blue blanket that he’d loved so much, bringing bittersweet memories of the way he’d bared his teeth and snarled as they’d fought over it during their playful tugs-of-war.

  With the heel of his hand, he brushed away the tears that somehow still kept leaking, for all that he felt utterly dried out inside. Then he marched inside his home for his shotgun and a pocketful of shells.

  Chapter One

  I

  Herculaneum, Naples

  In the small hours of a Thursday morning nearly three months ago now, the Neapolitan suburb of Herculaneum had been struck by an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale. Several people had suffered bad falls, including an old man who’d tripped on his stairs in his hurry to get out, and so had broken his neck and died before the ambulance could arrive. That same afternoon, during rush hour, a second and even more violent quake had claimed three more lives and caused dozens more serious injuries. It had put cracks in numerous buildings and had brought down two old houses altogether. Roads had been torn open. A footbridge had collapsed. Several underground pipes had burst, flooding the town with water and turning the air putrid. The town’s famous archaeological sites had been closed for emergency repairs and hadn’t yet reopened. The most lasting impact, however, had been the fear. Vesuvius had been dormant so long that everyone living here had grown complacent, tuning out the warnings of the experts and bragging instead about the cheapness of the housing and its convenience for Naples; about its gorgeous views over the sea and the richness of its soil.

  No one was bragging any more.

  The Red Zone around the great volcano’s foothills had been on amber alert ever since, its second highest state of readiness, indicating that a catastrophic eruption was possible within weeks. But everyone knew that was nonsense. Volcanoes weren’t expectant mothers, waiting patiently for their due dates. They struck when they struck, and that was that. Besides, it was no secret that the experts at the Vesuvius Observatory had already recommended an evacuation but t
hat the region’s politicians had said no, aware of how chaotic and expensive it would prove, how unforgiving their citizenry would be if no eruption happened. So everyone was living on their nerves instead, kept jittery by aftershocks and the plume of black smoke that had been rising ominously from the caldera ever since, pumping out enough particulate ash to disrupt air traffic, affect the weather and give everyone a cough. Every evening, tucking their children into bed, parents would fret that tonight might be it. Every morning, setting off for work after another sleepless night, nerves were that little bit more frayed and tempers that much shorter.

  ‘The fuck you park there for, you moron?’ yelled the bearded man in the silver van, honking and shaking his fist. ‘Get out of the bloody way!’

  Lucia Conte was a librarian with a librarian’s sense of decorum. But she was a Neapolitan too, and had her dignity to think of. She buzzed down the rear window of the Ford Discovery, therefore, to return some fire. ‘Get lost, arsehole,’ she shouted.

  Behind the steering wheel, Taddeo Santoro, the outsized and impressively bearded head of Naples’ famous Archaeological Museum, glanced wryly across at his closest and oldest friend, the diminutive history professor Zeno D’Agostino of TV fame. ‘Our city’s most distinguished papyrologist, don’t you know,’ he murmured.

  ‘You’re the one who parked in the middle of a junction,’ grumbled Lucia.

  ‘What choice did I have?’ replied Taddeo, shrugging at the gridlocked traffic. But at last there was movement ahead, allowing them to roll far enough forward for the van driver to squeeze by behind and speed off with a final rude gesture. Then traffic congealed once more. Taddeo turned to Lucia. ‘Any word from our friend yet?’

  ‘His phone must be off.’

  ‘Damn the man,’ he said, scratching irritably at his bearded throat. ‘He does it on purpose.’

  ‘It’s no distance from here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go check.’ She jumped out and hurried up the hill, brushing aside the waitress touts as they tried to shoo her into the tourist cafes with their laminated menus. She rounded the corner and saw Rupert Alberts at once, standing atop the station steps, dressed in his habitual black woollen suit, his brown hair and eyebrows at least halfway silver despite him still being only in his early forties. Slender and undeniably handsome, save for the unattractive yet characteristic sour smile on his lips, as though glad to have been kept waiting, grateful for the grievance. He was Canadian by birth, but he’d been living in Rome for a decade or more, where he’d acquired an impressive expertise and reputation, so that they were extremely fortunate to have him on this project, as Lucia kept having to remind herself. For there were times…

  She shouted out to him and waved. He pretended not to notice. She drew closer and called out again, leaving him no choice. ‘We got stuck,’ she said, with deliberately provocative cheerfulness. ‘All this traffic.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘The morning commute. Whoever could have foreseen?’

  ‘Not you, obviously. Or you’d have come to meet us.’

  He gave her a withering gaze. She smiled brightly then turned and led the way back, arriving to find Taddeo pulling a U-turn in the street, to the loud displeasure of the traffic he was blocking. Lucia made to get in the back, only for Alberts to assert priority. But he froze when he saw the young American Carmen Nero already in there, for he was palpably uncomfortable around women, and the prospect of being sandwiched between two of them clearly dismayed him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded waspishly.

  ‘Lucia needed an assistant,’ said Carmen, glossing over the fact that she’d been pestering Lucia for weeks for a chance to visit the Villa of the Papyri.

  ‘An assistant? Whatever for?’

  ‘To fetch helmets, torches, water, snacks. Anything you might need.’

  Alberts turned back to Lucia. ‘Isn’t that your job?’

  ‘No,’ said Lucia. ‘It isn’t.’

  They got in. Taddeo completed his turn. Traffic was looser this way. They turned right at the foot of the hill, passing by the pedestrian entrance to the town’s famed archaeological park, buried beneath Vesuvius’s devastating 79 CE eruption. At first, it had seemed that this town had got away from it, thanks largely to the prevailing winds dumping most of the volcanic fallout on Pompeii and elsewhere. But then the whole caldera had collapsed, sending a pyroclastic avalanche of scorching ash and gases careening down its western slope at such velocity that no one could have hoped to outrun it or survive the thermal shock. Then had come wave after wave of volcanic sludge, like concrete poured from a mixing truck, burying the whole town some twenty-five metres deep. Another smaller eruption in 1631 had added several metres more. And so it had remained, never quite forgotten but always beyond reach, until the mid-eighteenth century, when teams of enterprising treasure hunters had dug tunnels down to the various sites for the sculptures, mosaics and the like – including, famously, the only ancient library ever substantially recovered, some 1800 scrolls found in the seafront palace known as the Villa of the Papyri, their destination this morning.

  Those first excavations had been brutal work, however. The tunnels had been poorly lit, filled with pockets of lethal gas and prone to sudden collapse. Finds had gradually dried up. It had no longer been worth the effort. The tunnels had been closed, their location lost. So the Villa had remained undisturbed for another two centuries or so, until a new team of archaeologists had resolved to find it once again.

  Lucia had been a schoolgirl here at the time. She’d stopped off on her way home every afternoon, had even cut a small hole in the fence to watch as the great mechanical diggers chomped away extraordinary amounts of earth, digging a pit the size of an Olympic stadium out of the ground to reach the Villa and enable new excavations. She herself had been one of the first to see it, given an atmospheric torchlight tour by an American archaeologist called Cassie Green who’d noticed her daily vigil. Until that afternoon, Lucia had entertained romantic visions of curing diseases or fighting famines in squalid tent cities in the developing world. Afterwards, her only ambition had been to work with the Villa’s scrolls, perhaps even to discover a text to shake the world.

  She’d realised the first part of that ambition many years before, on joining the Herculaneum papyrus team at Naples’ National Library. But the reason they were here this morning was because – thanks, perversely, to the recent quakes – the second part of her ambition looked set to come true too.

  II

  Via Siracusa, Rome

  There was nowhere to park outside the apartment building, so Knöchel pulled the van up on the pavement opposite and put the hazard lights on. Then he glanced across at Dieter as if to ask what next. Dieter stared straight back at him. ‘Get on with it,’ he said.

  Knöchel jumped down and crossed the street to the smoked-glass front door, cupping his hands round his eyes to peer into the lobby. Then he walked briskly back, shaking his head. ‘Envelope’s still there,’ he said, belting himself back in.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Dieter.

  A week in this shithole city already, and still no sight of Cesco Rossi or Carmen Nero, despite their names being on the buzzer and the lobby mailbox too, out of which protruded the end of the long white envelope that his detective had left there herself, in order to check it from outside.

  His knee began to throb, as it always did when Rossi got one over on him. Five months ago, in Calabria to arrange a new cocaine supplier, Dieter had dived a wreck-site supposedly belonging to his hero, the Visigoth king Alaric I. Only it had turned out to be a patch of sand seeded with pottery by Cesco Rossi himself in order to fleece mugs like him. No one fucked with Dieter that way. No one fucked with him and lived. So he’d tracked him to the city of Cosenza, only to crash his Harley at the critical moment, ripping his anterior cruciate ligament so badly it had needed surgery and months of rehab.

  ‘Bastard better come back soon,’ muttered Knöchel. ‘My youngest turns four on Sunday.’

  ‘Is that right?’
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  ‘Just saying. Angie will skin me.’

  Dieter turned to gaze at him. His rage at Rossi was sincere enough. At times, just thinking about him, his chest became a furnace. But vengeance wasn’t his only motivation. Six months ago, he’d ruled the Stuttgart Hammerskins unchallenged. Not just another biker gang-leader but a force to be reckoned with. Then Rossi had ruined everything. His knee. His cocaine supply. His income. Even his authority. Sometimes, these days, he’d catch his men whispering together. He’d walk into a room and silence would fall. Once-trusted lieutenants like Knöchel would answer back. Not insurrection. Not yet. But doubt, yes. Murmurs. And changes of leadership were fast and brutal in the Hammerskins. He himself had beaten his predecessor to death with a monkey-wrench in front of his woman and half their crew. Dieter had no intention of ending up that way himself. So every time anyone had got above themselves, he’d talked darkly to them of what he’d do to Rossi. But really he’d been telling them what he’d do to them if they didn’t fall back in line. And it had worked too. But now the bill was due, and either Rossi or he himself would have to pay. ‘What are you suggesting, Knöchel?’ he asked.