The Seventh Commandment

by Tom Fox

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The electrifying new thriller by Tom Fox, author of Dominus. If you loved the new Dan Brown book Origin, and Simon Toyne, you'll love this edge-of-your-seat religious conspiracy thriller. ' The Seventh Commandment is a fine mystery thriller that is both well-written and as intriguing as it is exciting' For Winter Nights Chaos is about to descend on the Eternal City. The River Tiber will run with blood. A darkness will consume the sun. And that is just the beginning. An ancient stone bearing seven predictions is unearthed in a dig. Then, when gunshots are fired by the river, Akkadian language specialist Angelina Calla and Vatican expert Ben Verdyx are stunned to realise they are the targets. The tablet connects them: they are the only people in Rome who can decipher it. But can these prophecies be real? And why does someone want Ben and Angelina dead? Now they must put aside their differences to unravel the terrifying truth before their time runs out.

Release date: June 15, 2017

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

I want to thank the readers of Dominus, together with its novella companions Genesis and Exodus, for the extraordinary response their publication met last year. It was an absolute thrill for me to see Dominus climb through the charts in so many countries, to see its covers on the sides of buses and on trains throughout Europe, and to receive such a wonderful response from readers and reviewers. It was this reaction, above all else, that inspired me to push forward with the present book, and I can only hope that those of you who enjoyed the previous will enjoy this one as well.

To my friend, masterful literary agent and ever-willing lunch companion, Luigi Bonomi, my sincerest thanks, as ever. He, together with Alison, Dani and the rest of the crew at LBA Books, put such effort and enthusiasm into my work, and it is a joy to have them behind (and beside, and in front of) me in this wonderful literary world. There simply isn’t a better agent out there.

Emily Griffin has always been such a tremendous believer in my writing, and working with her at Headline was a genuine treat. I miss her now that she’s moved on to other roles, but am absolutely delighted to be surrounded by the enthusiastic likes of Frankie Edwards, Kitty Stogdon and the whole, energetic team at Headline in the UK. In the USA, my Quercus team continue to pour their hearts and souls into the amazing American editions of my books; and all the international editors, translators and publishers do jobs that simply amaze me. I am fortunate to be surrounded by as superlative a set of publishers as an author could hope to work with, and my thanks are due to them all, both for the great success of Dominus as well as the enthusiastic labours poured into this book and future projects.

As with the writing of Dominus, I had access to a collection of priests who provided extraordinary insider knowledge on both the operations of the Curia in Rome, as well as an induction into the extraordinary communities of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. All, as before, wish to remain anonymous, but my profound ‘surreptitious’ thanks to Fr A—, Fr I—, Fr J— and the young monk Br D— who became as much a friend as a resource.

Finally, to all the reviewers who take the time to transfer their enthusiasm for a good book into a review, whether in the national papers, on the radio, on blogs, on Goodreads or Amazon or elsewhere: thank you! You’re such an integral part of this beautiful, book-minded world, and as an author I am far from alone in being truly, deeply appreciative of the time you take on our behalf.

Here’s to what’s ahead!

It happened during the night, or during the earliest morning. At least, so would go the official stories, to emerge in due course from the confusion generated by the discovery and the chaos of the days to follow.

The discovery itself took place at 4.15 a.m., according to the most reliable reports. Later legend would have it that it was spotted first by a jogger, eyes adapting to the changing light of morning; but with an event so large, that swept through a city of so many millions, such a tale could amount only to wishful thinking. The media, as the world had long known, always craves a point of initial contact, a voice to speak as ‘the first on the scene’. And too often they will create what they cannot find.

As to when it truly began, such speculations could only be guesswork. They ranged from a few minutes before the first crowds began to gather, there in the morning light, to perhaps several hours earlier. The receding darkness of the Roman night, illuminated only by the false blues and oranges of so much electric light, made it all but impossible to tell the river’s true colour until the first rays of dawn started to creep over the rooftops.

But when the sun finally rose and those rays came, there was no guessing any more.

Something had happened.

In the rising brightness of morning, the great Tiber River sparkled like a time-worn ribbon streaking through the unsuspecting city. For how many millennia she had carved her way through that landscape could never be known, but as a landmark she was as ancient as written history. And though she flowed that day in the same direction she always had, charting no different a course than she’d woven through Rome’s seven hills since the city first rose out of myth and legend, the light of this day saw her appear as never before in the whole of her storied history.

The river flowed red, thick and crimson and opaque.

Between her banks, the pulsing artery swept like an angry brushstroke through the Eternal City. It lapped at the large boulders that lined the Tiber’s course here and there, at the concrete barriers that cemented its path in the most central regions. And the city woke, and saw the wonder, and flocked in droves to the riverside.

The scent remained as noxious as always. The Tiber had been polluted to the point of muted ecological crisis for years, and while it retained its visual appeal, few sought out its banks for invigorating strolls or breaths of air that even vaguely resembled fresh. But this morning the elderly exited their apartments alongside children, businesswomen alongside hastily parked taxi drivers, all to bear the burden of pinching their noses at the river’s shores in order to stare as a vein of blood cut through the heart of their venerable home.

They watched – a whole population, crowded along its embankments, gazing down from riverside windows or catching live feeds on televisions and browsers. Mystified. Confused. Some laughed, some took snaps and began new trends on social media as curiosity swept across the Internet and memes guessing at hows and whys blazed through online forums and filled Twitter timelines. Other observers tried to conceal their worry. Yet others openly shouted foul. Protested. Complained. Blamed.

Some stayed away, afraid.

But the river ignored them all. As blood pulses through arteries whether witnessed or not, the old river simply flowed, steadily, calmly, ominously, with redness pouring from her eyes.

The object that would change everything was not of impressive proportions. It was neither massive nor ornate, and in appearance it was not visually captivating. As Manuel Herrero held it in his hands, his fingers curled gently around its rough edges, it felt almost ordinary. And yet, somehow, majestic.

Manuel was himself covered in dust and grime, red nicks marking his flesh from the labours of the dig. He wore his usual coveralls, ragged and dirty from years of service, and his face was smeared with sweat that bore muddy tracks from the backs of his hands. He had never been a man to stand on formality or care about appearance, but in this instant he suddenly felt unworthy. Moments such as this were the preserve of greater men than he. Men of refinement, of authority, and with decent clothes.

Nevertheless, it was he and no one else who bore the object in his grip, and Manuel’s eyes glistened. It was all but surreal that he should be holding it – that something like this could actually be nestled between his tired fingers. A discovery.

The stone, he imagined, must have lain at rest beneath the soil for untold generations. Silent, waiting. The earth above it had perhaps at first been only dust, maybe a thin layer. The physical residue of the sky – innocuous particles that float on the breeze, gently accumulated as they settled from heaven over the span of so many years. Gradually the dust would have become a layer of new earth, the former specks of sky transformed into ground and loam, layer over layer, shielding the stone’s flat surface from view until it was secreted wholly away, hidden from the eyes of history.

Or perhaps the stone – maybe he should call it a tablet, it was really more tablet-like than stone – had been intentionally buried. It would have been a dark night, that seemed only appropriate: either devoid of or overwhelmingly filled with stars. Either would have fit the occasion. A man, likely in loose-fitting robes and probably with a hood concealing gaunt features, slicing the razor edge of his spade into the stony earth. Would it have been a deep burial? Certainly nowhere near as deep as it lay now, so many metres beneath the noise of the surface streets above, a whole world having arisen over it as the centuries passed. But perhaps an arm’s depth, back when it was first concealed. Enough to vanish from the scrutiny of the world’s inhabitants, as intentionally as any other burial, though likely far more secretive.

Or it might not have been buried at all. Perhaps it had been enshrined, right here, in this place. Not dropped into a pit dug in the clandestine night-time, but mounted in glory. Venerated, committed to eternal memory and the protection of whatever divine force had inspired its creation.

Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine . . .

There would have been songs and ceremony, surely, with chants like those offered for a departing soul, preserving that which was meant to bear the light of influence upon the future.

Lux perpetua luceat ei . . .

Manuel glanced around him. The routine dig, mandated by the city, was hardly ceremonious now. Mud and dust were caked into fierce lines left over from the industrial digger, slanting at incongruous angles through layers of carved tarmac and paver stones. The tablet had been situated atop a slab of limestone that was likely once beige, before the sweat of subterranean minerals seeped in and changed its colour to a strange hodgepodge of greys and greens. Ugly, unartistic and wholly inconsequential. But it could have, just could have, once been something more. A table. A shrine. An altar.

Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam . . .

Yes, Manuel thought, I will go unto the altar of God. The old psalm verse sprang unbidden to mind, years of pious Catholic upbringing never failing to push at the shape of his conscious thoughts. To God, my exceeding joy. Those were the kinds of words that would have been sung – and there would have been chanters somewhere, almost certainly, tucked away in a recessed alcove long since collapsed to rubble. What tongue would they have spoken? He didn’t know enough about ancient languages to be certain of what he was looking at on the tablet’s surface, but even such knowledge wouldn’t provide a sure answer. The tablet could be far older than whatever society had left, buried, enshrined it in this place.

Far older.

All Manuel knew for certain was that somehow, in some way, this little discovery in his hands was going to change his life. He would not be the same, and the world would never again look as it had before.

Beneath the surface of his skin, in the nutrient-rich layer of subcutaneous fat that buffered it from flesh, tendon and bone, a host of foreign molecules hydrated and latched on to the vibrant blood cells pulsing through Manuel Herrero’s capillaries. Through them the tiny forces had access to his deeper arteries and veins, into which they moved with rhythmic speed. The fact that his heartbeat was racing at a rate far higher than usual only served to push things along.

It may have been biological in form, molecular and therefore without intelligence to plot or scheme, yet the compound in his flesh was a pathogen and worked true to its foreboding name. The pathos, that fittingly ancient term for suffering, would come quickly enough. In anticipation, the substance raced through him, seeking the man’s vital organs, latching on with a ferocity and permanence that could almost have amounted to fervour or zeal.

Outside the shell of his flesh and skin, the man still held the tablet in his hands, face flushed with the joy of discovery and his mind overwhelmed with thoughts of a life about to change. Inside, within only minutes, his organs were already beginning to decay.

By the time he learned that his life was ending, rather than changing, it would be too late. The tablet, the prophecy, and the discoverer’s death – they were never meant to be separated.

And they never would be.

Bodies flowed across the Piazza della Rotonda in wavelike motion, brilliant in a bewildering array of colours and fashions. They emitted the constant hum of a dozen languages and a hundred conversations – the painted, noisy backdrop of modern Rome, scented by espresso shots and cigarettes, humming in all its vibrant complexity and chaotic normalcy.

Angelina Calla observed them all, as she had so many times before.

Bodies moving like the tide. The thought was automatic, an interior voice that was a familiar rattle in her head, though its words at this moment were too poetic. She reflected, her shoulders sagging, seeking an alternative. Like beetles. Unstoppable beetles. A slight nod, only to herself. It was the right image, and Angelina Calla rejoiced, even as she lamented.

The tourist trade, she had long ago learned, has no down season in Rome. There are high points in the year, there are lows, but there is no moment when calm overtakes the city as eternal in its bustle as in its legend. It was the first lesson Angelina had taken in as she’d been swept into her unwilling role and trade. She’d admired Rome all her life. Loved it. She could recount its history and mythology with the best of them, and perhaps better than most. But it was only when she’d taken to the streets and stepped out into the fray – propelled there rather than wandering the path by choice – that she had learned that ancient Roma was the true definition of a city that never sleeps or slows.

But how I wish it would all slow down, even for just a moment. Just long enough for the world to be set right.

The tourist waves came in undulating cycles. Their movements at first had seemed just as random as the beetles now imaged in Angelina’s mind, just as unpredictable, and only after a season of careful observation did it become clear that there was a pattern to their frenetic behaviour. Apparently aimless bouncing from fountain to church to corners of particular squares concealed a widespread, consistently focused desire: to stand in just the right position before just the right landmarks, to take a selfie – the absurdity of the word! – that would make tourists X, Y and Z look precisely like tourists A, B and C, and every other gawper who’d ever bought summer tickets to the Italian Mecca.

Beetles. Maybe they’re lemmings?

Shit.

She knew she had to foster a different mindset. It’s a necessity, at this point in my life. She ruminated, not without a hint of bitterness, on her reality. There’s no other way.

She drew her white leatherette handbag more squarely on to her lap, the knock-off gold of the cheap Versace Aurora clasp glimmering in the Italian sunlight and reflecting its rays into her brick-red hair. At the same time, she straightened herself to a less deflated posture at the metal coffee table. Beyond, framed into cramped place by surrounding buildings that had gone up over the centuries but no less impressive for it, the round hulk of the Pantheon marked the periphery of her present urban landscape.

For a woman whose livelihood came from the insatiable appetites of those wide-eyed visitors, at least a thousand of whom were currently milling about just beyond her table, filtering in great queues between the columns of the ancient temple to all the gods of Rome, now dedicated to the martyrs of the Christians, their constant presence was tantamount to job security. No tourists, no tours. And for a tour guide, no tours meant no cash, which meant no ability to buy overpriced espresso and sit at an outdoor café lamenting that she hadn’t found a better lot in life.

But it wasn’t easy to accept a reality that went against everything in her bones. Angelina Calla had brought herself up to be a scholar. She’d trained her mind, surrounded herself with wisdom and antiquity and history, certain since her afternoons as a small girl wandering through the cultural history museum in Lanciano that one day she would call those kinds of surroundings her own. Dedicating herself to the study of Classical Akkadian at university – a language tied to a culture that had flourished in Babylon and Mesopotamia almost five millennia before she had been born, long predating the Christians – Angelina had set herself on the knife-edge of a scholarly field undertaken by very few. The language itself had appealed to her linguistic interests: its characteristically angular, rune-like appearance had been one of the features that had attracted her to it when, as a teenage girl, she’d chanced upon a copy of Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts and found herself entranced in the stories of Gilgamesh’s deluge and the Enuma Elish, of the goddess Astarte and the Code of Hammurabi, all of which had opened up to her in the splendour of ancient wonder and fantasy. Other people had religion and revelled in the myths of Abraham and Noah, but Angelina – conscientious humanist and, by association, convinced atheist – had never scraped after such fables or the faiths that went with them. She had ancient Babylon, the spiritual rush of human history without the burden of religious ideology, and that was more than enough for her.

By the time she’d finished her masters degree in Akkadian language and culture, Angelina was one of only a few people in the world who could consider themselves genuinely proficient in the long-dead script, and her PhD had led her into even narrower circles of expertise. It had been more than simply her academic field or the aim of her future career. It was her passion.

In the end, it had amounted to little else. A hoped-for career had been forcibly relegated to a hobby, Angelina’s dreams of academic loftiness shattered by a scholarly world that just didn’t seem to want her. A long string of unsuccessful job applications and discouraging interviews had left her to take whatever employment she could find – currently, as the most overqualified tour guide in Rome.

‘Is that the place where Caesar got his water?’ Angelina dragged a bent wooden stirrer through her coffee as her general malaise coalesced into concrete memories of the two tours she’d given that morning – stock-in-trade hour-long walks through ‘The Rome of Ancient History’ that were the staple nourishment of her present existence. The bizarre question had come from a particularly inquisitive member of her second group, just before lunch, as the woman had posed in a floral muumuu for a stream of photographs her trigger-happy husband never stopped taking. She’d asked it while pointing to a marble fountain with a massive depiction of the Graeco-Roman god Triton at its centre, whose date of construction, ‘AD 1643’, was clearly carved into its central spire.

‘No, my dear. Close, and a very good guess, but not quite.’ The reply that came out of Angelina’s mildly chapped lips had been gentle, friendly and understanding – characteristics that had come with practice. ‘This is the Fontana del Tritone, and came slightly later than that, as a gift to Pope Urban VIII by one of our most famous Renaissance sculptors and architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also designed much of St Peter’s Square. Though Julius Caesar did live in this part of the city.’ Twenty centuries before. She’d smiled, which had taken tremendous effort.

The tourist had nodded knowingly, as if this had been what she’d suspected all along. A plastic sun visor protruding from her forehead like a duck’s bill cast a purple glow over her features, through which her expression suggested that it was sheer politeness by which she condescended to be corrected by a tour guide. Angelina could see the computation of her tip decreasing in the other woman’s sour expression.

This was a common phenomenon, to which Angelina had grown accustomed over the past thirteen months of this strange but necessary employment. The average tourist came to Rome ‘knowing’ only two things about the ancient city: that Julius Caesar lived and died here, and that gladiators – who in their minds all spoke with dispassionate, monotone Australian accents and looked unsurprisingly like Russell Crowe – fought their way through the streets on a more or less daily basis. Every spot such people passed was assumed to be the locus of one or the other of these events, until forcibly persuaded otherwise; and then, the corrections were only grudgingly received.

That had been her morning. Just like yesterday. And the day before. Just like tomorrow.

And so there was a sigh, and another espresso, and another interior lamentation, and Angelina’s day proceeded like all the rest.

The weight of her thoughts was almost enough to keep Angelina distracted from the strange movements of the crowds around her. Thoughts can be like an anchor, the more discouraging ones forged of a heavy iron that roots us in our own spot in the sea, oblivious to the swells of the world around us, stuck and immobile, her interior monologue had lamented more than once. But though Angelina’s anchor was heavy at that moment, her ship going nowhere, she could see over the waves just enough to notice that something about the course of the bodies in the ancient square was – unusual.

Yes, many still queued at the pillars of the Pantheon, waiting to stand atop the classical marble floor and gaze up at the square-recessed dome whose bronze and gold had been stripped away in the sixteenth century to be melted down for the artistic decoration of St Peter’s Basilica. And yes, many continued to sit at small tables in front of coffee shops all around the square, just like her.

But there was a motion away from the square that was entirely out of the ordinary. Hordes of bodies pushed to make their way out of its arteries – the picturesque Via della Rotonda to the south and the Salita de’ Crescenzi to the west – as well as the smaller streets that broke away to the north. Normally every avenue of access to the Pantheon was a way in, but at this moment, they all appeared to be exits. All except those directed eastward, which remained almost empty.

A curiosity, Angelina mused. The only direction that doesn’t point towards the river.

Something was drawing them, like a magnet pulling them away from the landmark site.

Because Angelina Calla had nothing better to do, she rose from her table, dropped a few euros into the glass dish she hadn’t used as an ashtray, and followed the crowds towards the water.

Dr Ben Verdyx sat at his office in complete silence. No earbuds dangled from his ears, and he tended never to power up his computer unless there was an immediate need to use it. Apart from the gentle whisper of the ventilation system flushing fresh air into the enclosed basement space, Ben’s surroundings were pristinely silent, just as he liked them.

He was also alone, which was, again, exactly the situation Ben Verdyx preferred. One of the great perks of his position was that it, unlike so many others in the world, was decidedly not people-centred.

Ironically, gaining a post in the Vatican’s ‘Secret Archives’, as the old Latin archivum secretum was generally and erroneously translated, had involved the same sort of public advertisement and interview process as any other. All those years ago – it would be five in a few months’ time – encountering the phrase ‘Enjoys working well with others’ on the job description had sent Ben into spasms of anxiety, nearly sufficient to forgo applying altogether. But he’d held his resolve, only too relieved to learn in due course that it was merely Human Resources verbiage and had little to do with the actual expectations of the job. A senior archivist for the venerable Archives needed to be in love with books and manuscripts, with brown-edged folios and historical memoirs, not with the sound of his own, or anyone else’s, voice. Ben Verdyx loved the former things as much as he detested the latter, which had made him essentially perfect for the position.

His family had of course urged Ben on to far greater and higher things. His parents, God rest their immortal souls, had never ceased pushing Ben towards higher-profile, and consequently higher-income, professions from his youth through to their deaths – both within eight months of each other through the predictable, if unpleasant, ravages of age. It had been hard to lose them both so closely together, but that was the way of God, Ben had reminded himself at the time. Always mysterious, rarely explicable, but generally in control of the broader sweep of life.

Ben had always been clever, perhaps even brilliant, and so his mother had wanted him to be a lawyer, his father a politician; but Ben’s profoundly introverted personality had more or less ruled out such suggestions. The mere thought of the interpersonal contexts those positions entailed was enough to bring a physical pain into his chest, two great hands squeezing out his breath and constricting his heart. Even the little photo of him on the left-hand wall of the entrance to the Vatican Secret Archives bore witness to his general social discomfort. For the past five years Ben’s visage had been a part of the small collection of staff member portraits presented there, caught frozen on film with his brow covered in sweat and his eyes appearing to point in two different, equally uncomfortable directions, looking for all the world like a man nailed for a mugshot on his way to the local jail.

But at least Ben himself didn’t have to look at the photograph. He could walk straight past it on his way in each morning, moving through security and down the stairs into the Archives’ second sub-level, into an office that was his oasis from the present and portal into the past. There, the only voices that spoke to him came through the long-silent words of the dead, and the only sounds that disturbed his peace were those his historically minded imagination crafted – the sounds of horse hooves along well-trod trade routes between Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century, or the ominous clanking of metal sounding from six hundred swords in a Roman phalanx in the third, or the stolid, serene voice of a poet speaking Attic verse into an amphitheatre of enrapt Greek hearers a half millennium before that. These were the sounds of life that Ben could handle. The sounds he loved.

Though occasionally this peace was shattered, and when it was, it never boded well. As the small telephone on his office desk suddenly lurched to life, dancing on the panelled surface as its shrill ring echoed through the recycled air, Ben could feel his insides constrict and his peace race from him like a charioteer from too long ago, fleeing the grounds of battle.

Five minutes later, Ben was standing outside the entrance to the Archives, surrounded by the ancient stonework of the courtyard that nestled it cosily into the heart of Vatican City. It lay beyond the Porta di Santa Anna, inside one of the three open squares of the immense structure located due north of the Sistine Chapel, known by most simply as Vatican Palace. To Ben’s chagrin, the courtyard outside the Secret Archives was the only one of the three that had been, out of necessity, converted into a car park. All the glory and splendour of man’s best approximation of the City of God, and his office opened on to tarmac.

He desperately wanted a cigarette, but Father Alberto had told him it was ungodlike to smoke, and Ben’s devotion drove him to obey. Ben had been trying his best to give it up for months. He’d followed the teenagers he saw everywhere by taking up ‘vaping’, which as near as Ben could tell was all the hassle and display of smoking without the fun of a legitimate nicotine rush, but it was better than nothing. The little red light indicated his e-cig was powered on, and as Ben drew in a long inhale, the cloud that resulted removed any doubt.

The telephone call had disturbed him deeply. He didn’t like calls in general, but he disliked the anonymous sort even less, and this was the second one that he’d received within a month. It was not a pattern he wanted to become established.

Especially if they were going to bear only on nonsense. Ben had always been a man of a deeper faith than most. His parents had loathed his inclinations towards the mystical bents within Catholicism, and it was only by grace that they were both with their Maker by the time Ben had discovered the Catholic Charismatic Movement and its sidelined, Pentecostally minded commune of devotees in the eastern reaches of the city. Hands raised in praise and rushes of prophetic tongues would have mortified his conservative mother beyond salvage, despite the stirring effect it had on Ben’s soul. Simply mentioning prophetic ecstasy would have likely given his father a bigger stroke than the one that had killed him.

But even Ben’s mystic bent knew the realm of prayer and hope was different from the realm of everyday experience and encounter. There were avenues for faith and vision in church, and there was the way the world worked, day by day, outside its doors.

But, the phone call . . .

He puffed another digital drag and walked across the car park, through two interconnected archways that led to the maze of passages linking the Apostolic Palace to the Sistine Chapel and ultimately St Peter’s. Emerging on to the grand circular piazza. . .