SECRETS OF THE CENTURIES
Some Things Were Meant to Stay Hidden
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
* * *
DEAN GIDDES
I love that quote. "X never marks the spot." I joked about having it carved above the entrance to the anthropology building. Believed it, too. In my experience as a historian, the truth was almost always more complicated and less exciting than the movies made it out to be. You spend a lot of time hunting through archives, and come back with a theory that no one can prove for sure: not because anyone's trying to hide the truth, but because the centuries have left you with nothing truly concrete to find.
This is the story that proved that I was wrong - wrong about all of that. And how.
My own part in it is marginal. I was dean of faculty at Georgetown when all of this happened. A group of professors and graduate students - an archaeologist, a religious scholar, a linguist, and some others - approached me to ask for the university's support for their research. They thought, based on some recent construction near the Tiber, that they had identified a new and unexplored section of the catacombs beneath Rome. They wanted to take a few months, go to Italy, and see what they could find by excavating the site.
It seemed simple enough. Sure, it was 2019, and the world looked like it was sliding further and further into chaos. But I was never one to believe the talk about how Europe was slipping into a whirlpool of crime and political fanaticism. I believed that Georgetown couldn't retreat from its international research. And besides: I trusted this group. They were good at what they did, close-knit, committed to each other and to their research. And I thought that they were resourceful enough that if anything did go wrong, they'd probably be able to improvise a way out in one piece.
On that much, at least, I was exactly right.
I know now how much I didn't realize, at the moment I signed those research grants. I didn't know that one of my colleagues was sick. I didn't know about the dreams that two of them had, dreams of long-vanished times and places. Most of all, I didn't know what waited in those catacombs: a secret buried for two millennia, a story that was meant to stay hidden. I didn't know the chaos that would be unleashed when my friends discovered it: chaos that would drive them from country to country, one step ahead of the most dangerous men on Earth, desperately unraveling the mystery that their lives depended on solving. I didn't know that, when they came back, they'd never even tell me the full tale of what had happened.
I didn't know any of that. If I had, I hope to God I'd never have signed the grant. But I did sign it, and my friends went to Rome, and in the tunnels deep beneath its streets they found the first page in a story that should have been lost to the ages: a story with the power to shake Christianity to its core and to turn the global order completely upside down. My friends never asked to be a part of that story. They weren't soldiers or spies or fanatics; they were just academics, men and women trying to understand the past. They didn't know, like I didn't know, that in the next few months they'd unravel the greatest mystery of the last two thousand years.
If they survived...