Being kissed by Florence was like getting punched in the face.
“You did it!” she shrieked, kissing him again. “You did it, Jake!”
“I did it,” he repeated, touching his cheek in stupefaction.
The world was alive with possibility. Fleet Street, the Disciplina Etrusca, this stunning girl – all were his for the taking.
The chamber beneath the column gained definition as the computer did its work, a vault just big enough for a man to stoop in. The Turkish archaeologists were embracing and giving each other high fives.
“Don’t you realize what we may have found?” Dr Gul said between drags on his cigarette. “Don’t you know why they’re so excited?”
“Well, we do have an inkling,” said Jake.
“And do you think they will be down there? Will we really find them?”
“Find ‘them’? Wait a minute, find what?”
“The relics, of course.”
Jake looked blank.
“The relics St Helena brought back from the Holy Land.”
“I haven’t got the foggiest what you’re on about, mate.”
The academic finished his cigarette and lit another with the butt. “St Helena was the Emperor Constantine’s mother,” he said. “During a pilgrimage to Bethlehem she claimed to have discovered the true cross and various other, how you say, religious ‘bits and bobs’. Received wisdom is that they were kept in a shrine beneath the column. But maybe not, maybe they were foundation deposits. Buried under the column, to bless it.”
“What sort of ‘bits and bobs’?” asked Florence, who seemed less than thrilled with the revelation.
“The crosses used to crucify the thieves who died alongside Christ. An ointment jar used by Mary Magdalene to wash Christ’s feet. And the baskets that carried the bread and fish he fed to the five thousand.”
“Blimey,” said Jake, thinking about headlines and bylines.
“If only we could excavate right away!” Dr Gul wrung his hands. “It’ll be months before we get the paperwork approved. I can’t bear it.”
But as it happened the dig began the very next morning.
*
Journalists swarmed, Heston had dispatched a photographer at short notice and a helicopter hovered overhead. Girders had been thrown up around the column to prevent subsidence as workmen excavated a tunnel towards the chamber at a forty-five degree incline. Amid the furore nobody noticed the interest of a distant blonde picking at a ball of candy floss.
“But how did you get permission so fast?” Jake asked.
“Let’s just say King’s College has close ties with the Turkish authorities,” Florence snapped. She had been livid after Jake filed copy, accusing him of creating a media circus which had imperilled the hunt. That it was his job to do so had not occurred to her.
“You must’ve bribed them, right?” tried Jake. “Off the record.”
Florence’s voice softened. “Off the record?”
“I promise.”
“Ok. Off the record then, no, we didn’t bribe them.” She shot him a smile and stalked off.
*
At noon the diggers hit granite. They filed the mortar from around one of the blocks and jemmied it halfway from the wall. The moment was on hand.
“The honour of being first inside should be yours,” Dr Gul told Florence, shepherding her to the tunnel.
All three donned masks and crawled in. In the first few feet of the tunnel the detritus of modernity protruded from the mud – pipes, cable, lumps of concrete. But soon this vanished, leaving only the odd twist of porcelain or rusted iron.
“We have reached the chamber,” said the old academic.
Jake heard stone grind on stone as the boulder was removed. Blood throbbed in his eardrums as he contemplated what a discovery would mean for him. His knuckles were white against the mud. There was a hiss of escaping gas, a grunt as the block was heaved aside, the click of a torch.
Florence spoke at last.
“Empty,” she said. “The chamber is completely empty.”