There was a new text message from John. It read simply: Jeff. Call me.

I felt a sudden chill, and I pulled the hotel bedding more tightly over my body, all too aware that it was not the least bit cold in the room.

John knows that Jeff is sick, I thought. He knows because he diagnosed Jeff. And he diagnosed Alexis. That's the reason for his concern. Now that I have spoken to Alexis, he probably knows that I know. About both of them. But he doesn't seem to know anything further about what Jeff has been doing in Italy.

Why not?

I deleted his text and pulled the bedding even more closely around my body, but I was still shivering. Because he was the link. John. Jeff's best friend. John was the only connection.

The sudden, unambiguous revelation was paralyzing. John was the only common denominator between my husband and my daughter-two people with dramatically different lives, living in different cities, and with no genetic relationship. They shared nothing except for the same, very rare form of cancer. And the same personal physician.

As I forced myself to emerge from the warm cocoon of a Naples hotel room bed, I was terrified that my husband had been murdered on the orders of his best friend.

Our attorney sounded both surprised and perturbed to be receiving a business call, on his home phone, at 10:30 p.m.

He sounded even more perturbed when I asked if my husband had made any recent changes to his will, and when I made it clear I needed to know the answer to that question immediately. My voice was steady, but my hands were shaking, as I could only hope attorney-client privilege would compel his silence should Jeff's murder be discovered before I could finish what I needed to do.

That was three days ago.

I was surprised to discover in myself that morning a sense of calm. It had come to me quietly in the form of a wonderful, terrible, haunting, poetic, and bittersweet dream.

I was still thinking of the dream as I sat on a Naples public bus once again, absentmindedly nibbling a pastry and sipping hot coffee. I marveled at the mysterious core of the human psyche that produces dreams like a belching volcanic crater buried deep in the mind, the Freudian Phlegraean Fields.

My mother used to tell me that all dreams have meaning. Despite my innate sense of logic, I believed her. Now, I knew that the Jeff in my dream was not really Jeff. He was the subliminal materialization of my own subconscious, manifest in the familiar form of my most trusted loved one. The objective part of my mind had finally found a way to speak, and I had heard it.

I was exactly in my element.

I had spent a lifetime accruing an encyclopedic knowledge of biology and had rigorously educated myself in the fields of cancer research and drug discovery. I had the insatiable inquisitiveness of a lifelong researcher and the critical eye of a highly trained scientist. I was following the trail of the man I loved more than anything and whom I knew better than anyone else in the world. My memory was as sharp as a razor. And I would stop at nothing. If I could not solve this puzzle, it could not be solved.

The more my self-doubt dissolved, the more clearly I understood what I needed to do. Alyssa would be expecting my call, but she would have to wait. Despite Jeff's warning to me in his text message, he himself actually had trusted someone. He had trusted just a single soul. And with that one act, he had instantly created a long list of those whom he had deliberately not trusted.

Everyone we knew was on it.

Her too.

A few minutes later, I stood before the one man Jeff had trusted.

I asked him his name, but I already knew it. His name was Aldo de Luca. I had learned it that morning from my attorney.

My next question was more complicated than the first. I asked him why he was homeless.

Aldo de Luca glared at me. "That's an easy question for you to ask, standing there instead of sitting because you don't want my sleeping quarters to dirty your expensive jeans."

Suddenly, I realized how out of place I must look in the makeshift homeless shelter of the central cloister of Santa Maria del Carmine. I sat down next to de Luca on the ragged mattress on the floor. "I apologize. What I meant was that you are obviously an intelligent, capable man. What happened in your life to make you end up here?"

He took my hand and examined it, turning it over to look at both the back and the palm. "Your husband was born into his charmed life," he said matter-of-factly. "Not you. You have known hardship. So you should already know the answer to your question."

I looked into his tired eyes, stunned at his sense of perception. He was right. I needed only to reflect upon my own history to understand how many variables can affect the course of one's life. Was Aldo de Luca born into this situation? Was he thrown into it? Did he make some huge, devastating mistake and bring it on himself? It was probably a combination of all three, and it didn't matter anyway. Whether sitting on a floor in a homeless shelter or behind a desk in a corner office, he was still the same person. And he was the closest thing to a friend that I had.

"I need your help," I said.

"I'm listening."

"I double-checked on the fifty thousand," I said. "It's in Jeff's will."

"Of course it is, or you would not be here."

"I will make it a hundred thousand, payable immediately. But first I need you to help me do something."

"What do you need me to do?"

"Not now," I said. "Tonight. Late."

"Why wait?"

"Because first I need to resurrect an ancient world from a two-thousand-year-old grave."

The direction of the work was given to a Spanish engineer named Roch Joachim Alcubierre. To borrow the Italian proverb, this man knows as much of antiquities as the moon knows of crabs. His incapacity caused the loss of many antiquities.

-Open Letter on the Discoveries of Herculaneum Johann Joachim Winckelmann (17171768)

Chapter Sixteen.

When the lost city of Herculaneum was rediscovered in the early 1700s, one of the first artifacts located and retrieved was a statue of Cleopatra. It was excavated along with a trio of female statues, each woman draped in a flowing silken tunic carved of the purest white marble. All four of these statues have since been lost once again.

It was Alyssa who told me of their existence. After leaving Aldo de Luca, I called her and accepted her offer of a full tour of the lab beneath Raimondo di Sangro's chapel. As we once again walked single file through the cramped underground tunnel toward the lab, I began asking questions.

Every scientist understands that inconsistent data is not the exception but the rule. Rarely does an entire package of evidence come fitting neatly together with no anomalies. If it does, one should be very skeptical. There is always at least one piece in the otherwise flawless jigsaw puzzle that stubbornly refuses to fit with the others. And it is usually this piece that ultimately leads to the true conclusion, formerly masked by the overshadowing, seemingly cohesive majority of the pieces-which turn out to have presented a distracting fallacy all along.

I asked Alyssa about the piece of the puzzle that didn't fit. "Why was the Villa dei Papiri never fully excavated?"

She smiled. "Excellent question. One I have been seeking the answer to since I first came to Naples. There is absolutely no shred of doubt that this villa is one of the most important archeological resources in human history. Other areas of Herculaneum have been excavated. The fact that this villa has been relatively neglected over the centuries while digging has continued at these other sites is a truly glaring omission in the archeological record. It's like unearthing the fossil of an extraterrestrial humanoid and then just walking away from it."

We reached the end of the tunnel, and Alyssa opened the door leading into the laboratory. This time, the space was bustling with activity.

I immediately felt at home. The constant, loud whirring of assorted machinery was a comforting sound. It was accompanied by a crackling radio blasting a Lethal Factor tune at full volume.

I've got something so, so bad Something in me I never wanted to know I had And it's changing all I know Raging inside, every day I can feel it grow This is my lab, I realized.

We had entered the facility into the biological sciences space, as evidenced by the familiar objects before me. Three parallel rows of lab benches spanned the room. Their shelves were stocked with bottles of clear and colored liquids, only a few of which were properly labeled with the appropriate universal hazard stickers. The remaining solutions were identified by strips of colored tape labeled with the scrawled handwriting of a rushed scientist. Lining the outer perimeter of the large main room were metal cabinets. I knew without looking inside that they would contain glassware, chemicals, assorted reagents, and specialized laboratory supplies. Four people, all of whom I guessed to be under thirty, were at work.

"Hi, Jackie," Alyssa said to one of them as we passed. The girl waved without looking up from her experiment.

"This is the main bio lab," Alyssa said. "Over here we have a cold room, a warm room, and a radioactive room"-she pointed to the doors of each in turn and then to a fourth door-"and this door leads to a separate space for tissue culture. You need to walk through it to get into the chemistry and analytical labs."

We stepped through the fourth door, passed between the tissue culture hoods, and entered the chemistry lab, crammed with fume hoods and additional benches. Lethal Factor became markedly louder.

Try, can you keep it locked inside?

Deep within the secret place it hides Block it away from you, trapped within But this can devour you through my skin Neatly sorted on one of the benches were the biological samples Alyssa and I had collected the previous day. A pimple-faced young man was feeding test tubes into a machine. He glanced up and offered a distracted greeting as we stepped past him.

Lying on the bench next to the collection of samples was my scuba tank. Alyssa picked it up and led me away with a subtle nod toward the young man.

Once we were alone, she leaned toward me. "The tank held both the normal scuba air mixture and carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide percentage was low-it would have taken quite a while for the gas to get to you. But the more you breathed, the more it overwhelmed your body. There is no doubt that was what caused you to faint."

"Interesting," I said. I took the tank from Alyssa and examined it. "They don't make this model of tank in the U.S. anymore."

She shrugged. "They probably don't make it here either. This particular one is clearly past its prime."

"See the connection here"-I pointed to a fitting-"these can take in a certain amount of air from the environment. The presence of carbon monoxide inside the tank could mean that someone tried to kill me. Or, it could just mean that someone stupidly set the tank down next to an idling VW bus before I used it. We will never know. But it doesn't matter. Even if this was an attempt on my life, it certainly wasn't the first. We need to move on."

"I know," she said.

"Have you procured a source of nardo?"

"No, I didn't make it out to the Himalayas yet this morning," Alyssa scoffed. "And, anyway, we're still not sure what a nardo is. But it's time to find out. Now that we have collected these samples, positively identifying the nardo plant has become the rate-limiting step in this entire endeavor."

"Then bring me up to speed," I said. "What can we learn, and what have you learned already, from Raimondo di Sangro and the others who have searched for the nardo before us? Tell me what you know, and I will tell you about the man I believe is trying to kill us both."

Alyssa opened a door and led me past a series of private offices. A nameplate on the door of the corner office read "Jeffrey Wilson, Ph.D."

We entered a break room with a small kitchen, and Alyssa headed straight to an espresso machine on the counter. She quickly prepared two large cappuccinos, and we sat across from each other at a small table, upon which sat an assortment of pastries. Alyssa motioned for me to help myself.

I walked Alyssa through my two encounters with the Naples transit policeman named Carmello Rossi. She appeared totally unsurprised.

She then began telling her story, the story of the rediscovery of the Villa dei Papiri in the 1700s. It began with a statue of Cleopatra, and three others eerily resembling the veiled Isis standing above us in Raimondo di Sangro's chapel.

Like so many of the world's most amazing discoveries, the lost city of Herculaneum was rediscovered by accident. The year was 1709, and Naples and the surrounding regions were under Austrian rule.

While digging a well, a feat accomplished in 1709 by leading oxen in a circle to drive a drill into the ground, a farmer began unearthing pieces of marble. The farmer began selling the marble fragments, and one of his first customers was Emanuel d'Elboeuf, the French prince commanding the Austrian cavalry.

Eager to complete his summer residence, the task that had brought him to shop for marble in the first place, d'Elboeuf confiscated the poor farmer's well on behalf of the Austrian government. D'Elboeuf began digging in earnest, and the three female statues were unearthed. They were quickly followed by the statue of Cleopatra. The statues were claimed as property of the Austrian government and placed in the king's garden in Vienna.

D'Elboeuf and his workers pillaged the building that had been drilled into until it was stripped clean. When the booty was gone, they filled in the holes. With no interests whatsoever in art, no such field as archeology existing at the time, and no apparent concept of historical preservation, no real records of the find were made.

The story might have stopped right there had it not been for a succession of women as ambitious as Cleopatra herself.

Twenty-five years after d'Elboeuf abandoned the site, two factors converged to revive the excavations at Herculaneum. The first was the ascension of a new king of Naples, or rather, the true monarch-his mother.

In 1734, Austria ceded Naples to Spain, and Naples fell under the rule of the Spanish royal dynasty controlling the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, although neither king nor queen was either Spanish or Sicilian.

King Philip V was the grandson of Louis XIV of France and was raised at the court of Versailles with aspirations to the French crown. Instead, he was granted the lesser Spanish crown. Philip's wife Queen Elisabetta was an Italian princess descended from the Medici dukes of Florence and the Farnese dukes of Lombardy. Throughout his reign, Philip suffered from severe depression that left him categorically incapacitated most of the time. So the kingdom was managed by his queen.

Queen Elisabetta installed her firstborn son, eighteen-year-old Charles, upon the throne of Naples. Four years later, Charles married. King Philip had sought a French bride for his firstborn in a feeble effort to cling to the French throne. Elisabetta's wishes prevailed, however, and Charles married a Prussian, Princess Maria Amalia, who coincidentally had grown up in the very Austrian palace containing the first statues excavated from Herculaneum-the three veiled females and the statue of Cleopatra.

While Charles nominally ruled his kingdom, it was his mother, the Italian-born Queen Elisabetta, who became determined to convert the run-down, poverty- and disease-infested cesspool that was Naples into "the Florence of the South." And this she did, funding her ambitious endeavors by taxing the Catholic Church on its lands. As the Church was the largest landholder in Campania, tax revenues tripled.

Elisabetta used the newly acquired funds to build three new palaces, a royal opera house, a prison, hospices, a cemetery, and a number of factories. The palaces were intended as museums as well as royal residences; therefore, she set the course to transfer a vast number of pieces from her family's priceless Farnese collection to Naples.

At the same time, in hopes of finding further additions for her collection, Elisabetta ordered that the Herculaneum excavations be resumed. Under the official direction of Charles, and the unofficial direction of Charles' mother, the vast ruins of Herculaneum and the recently rediscovered Pompeii were systematically plundered.

These efforts were led by a Spanish artillery engineer named Captain Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, whose sole mission was to find everything of monetary value and pluck it from the earth. As Alcubierre exhausted one source of buried treasure, he would delve unthinkingly into the next, backfilling each prior section with dirt from the new one.

It was under Alcubierre that the Villa dei Papiri and its library of scrolls were discovered.

Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero and friend of King Charles, became the first to attempt opening the papyrus scrolls. In an effort to soften the charred, brittle papyri, he immersed them in mercury. This dissolved the scrolls, and many of them were lost. Of course, di Sangro chose the most well-preserved of the scrolls for his experiments, thus leaving behind those that were even harder to decipher.

King Charles himself was fascinated with the scrolls. In addition to allowing di Sangro to work with them, Charles sent to Rome for assistance with them as well. Vatican calligrapher Padre Piaggio was the first to manipulate some of the scrolls without destroying them. Piaggio's infinite patience and sense of innovation produced a device that could at last unwind the scrolls, at a rate of one half inch per day. It was this device that I had seen in the Naples Archeological Museum on my first day in Italy.

Slowly and painstakingly, Padre Piaggio succeeded in being the first to unroll one of the papyrus documents recovered from the Villa dei Papiri. This single act took four years.

Piaggio continued unrolling additional scrolls and set to diligently copying their text. The Vatican calligrapher produced remarkably faithful reproductions of the text despite the condition of the scrolls and also despite the fact that he neither spoke nor read modern Greek, let alone ancient Greek.

Translation of the content was equally difficult. The papyrus was in such terrible condition and so many pieces had been lost that much of the author information and content were either missing or misunderstood. Indeed, several scrolls were literally translated backward in their entirety, and only many, many years later were the mistakes even recognized as such.

Meanwhile, the second factor involved in bringing Herculaneum to light was the expanding influence of the Enlightenment itself during the eighteenth century. This philosophical movement prompted a great interest in the study of antiquities.

A Grand Tour of Europe was considered an essential element of an upper-class education, and the aristocratic travelers known to Italians as milordi-"my lords"-came from far and wide throughout Europe. Rome was a quintessential stopping point, and soon Naples became one as well. As rumors of the ancient treasures began making their way across Europe, increasing numbers of Grand Tourists became determined to see the ruins for themselves, as well as to purchase the many replicas of Herculaneum booty that were suddenly all the rage.

Artists who could faithfully reproduce these coveted artifacts found abundant work in Naples. One such artist was Camillo Paderni, who was fascinated by the flawlessly frozen cross-sections of ancient Roman life. As he toured the excavation sites, Paderni produced image upon image of a world formerly unbeknownst to the public.

Paderni was also appalled that these cross-sections were being so brutally destroyed and began writing letters of complaint about Captain Alcubierre's methods. When antiquarian and well-respected writer Johann Joachim Winckelmann chimed in with his scathing critique that Alcubierre knew "as much of antiquities as the moon knows of crabs," Alcubierre was sent to a different post.

Alcubierre was replaced by Karl Weber, a Swiss architect and engineer, who produced the first true maps of the Villa dei Papiri and its surroundings as well as the many tunnels still present throughout the area today. Approximately eleven hundred additional scrolls were found and removed from the villa during Weber's supervision of the project.

Then the inevitable fate of monarchy politics intervened and set in motion another end to the Herculaneum excavations. King Charles' father, Philip V of Spain, had died in 1754. By 1759, Charles could no longer shirk his responsibility to the kingdom, and he reluctantly left Naples for Spain. Governing in Naples in his stead was a temporary stand-in until Charles' spoiled eight-year-old son Ferdinand could come of age.

Without the king's support, money for the project was diverted elsewhere. Excavations at Herculaneum were forcibly halted in favor of ongoing efforts at Pompeii, which lay considerably closer to the surface, making it easier and cheaper to explore. The death of Charles' mother, Elisabetta, the woman who had first initiated the work, sealed the fate of Herculaneum. The secrets still contained within the Villa dei Papiri would once again be forced to wait.

Charles' son Ferdinand came of age in 1767 and became the arrogant, ignorant boy-king of Naples-an event that would no doubt have represented the final nail in the coffin of Herculaneum and the villa if not for one unlikely variable.

Her name was Maria Carolina, and she would become Ferdinand's queen despite her loudly voiced opinion on the matter: "You might as well cast me into the sea." She was also the elder sister of the girl who would become known to history as Marie Antoinette, and whose notorious fate would only intensify Maria Carolina's hatred of all things French.

Maria Carolina became a close friend of Padre Piaggio, sitting with him for hours as he painstakingly unrolled a scroll. She safeguarded the papyrus scrolls from the Villa dei Papiri throughout the extensive fallout in Naples resulting from the French Revolution, and she successfully kept them from the hands of the pillaging Napoleon Bonaparte-for a while.

At the exact moment Alyssa mentioned Napoleon's name, I felt my chair shift beneath me, as if the disembodied head of Marie Antoinette had spoken.

At first, I thought I was experiencing a sudden attack of vertigo, a residual effect of the bends. I took a deep breath, my eyes scanning the small space of the subterranean kitchen. Then, an audible rumbling began beneath me, and a cupboard over the break room's small countertop swung open. The contents of the cupboard slid out, hitting the countertop and the floor beneath and shattering.

Alyssa stopped talking and looked curiously around her. "Get under the doorway," she said authoritatively.

"I'm from California," I reminded her, already moving into the most earthquake-safe area of the kitchen. For perhaps forty seconds, Alyssa and I huddled together under the thick doorframe leading out of the break room and into the lab. The rumblings continued, and we could hear the sounds of additional items crashing to the floor.