The Last Ember Read online

  “—you must find where the bridge began,” the professor said resignedly.

  “And now we have,” Salah ad-Din said, motioning to where the tunnel’s precipice lead to the cavern’s bright air. “We must now only find where this tunnel continues on the other side of the cavern.”

  A motorized, aluminum scaffolding lowered Salah ad-Din and the professor fifty feet to the cavern floor. Despite the scaffolding’s electric operation, it took nearly a half-minute to reach the floor.

  “You cannot even be certain there was once a bridge between these walls!” the professor said loudly over the electric saws and bulldozer engines.

  Walking now across the cavern floor, Salah ad-Din pointed to a wooden sawhorse table in front of him.

  “Yes, I can,” he said.

  When the professor saw the table’s contents he became oblivious to the sound of the generators, the shouted Arabic between workmen, the smell of their hashish mingling with the diesel and asphalt.

  Across the table, an illustrated eleventh-century map depicted the ruins of an arched Roman aqueduct that once spanned the cavern walls.

  “This is an original Crusader-era map of the Temple Mount. I thought none still existed,” Cianari said. “Where did you find this?”

  Salah ad-Din said nothing, a sign that the professor had touched on a topic too sacred for him to trespass. Even now, Salah ad-Din remembered the instructions about how to recover this map that his grandfather had feared was lost.

  “In the Assyrian wing of the Baghdad Museum, maps—” he managed to say through a hacking cough in the basement of their Beirut hovel. The mufti spoke only a few words at a time then, suffering from pulmonary disease in his last years. “A map of the Temple Mount.”

  Salah ad-Din waited twenty years to retrieve it. Not until 2003, during the confusion of the American invasion of Iraq, did he see his opportunity. He recalled entering the bombed-out Baghdad Museum disguised as a member of a UN preservation team, his adrenaline raging as he stood on the verge of recovering the crates that contained his grandfather’s life work. A skinny American soldier escorted him, trudging a few steps behind, nearly buckling under the weight of his gear. Salah ad-Din walked through the destroyed galleries without the slightest concern for the shattered Babylonian vases and display cases overturned by the recent looting. He remembered entering the storage room and seeing the black Turkish scimitar, the insignia of the Mufti’s SS Handschar Division, on a forgotten wooden crate in the corner. Salah ad-Din felt a moment of redemption greater than any religion could offer him.

  “I should radio this in,” the young American soldier nervously said of their discovery, fumbling for his walkie-talkie, but before he pressed down on the push-to-talk button, Salah ad-Din had unclipped the holster of the young soldier’s sidearm, removed the Army-issued Beretta, and now tilted the barrel into the boy’s collarbone beneath his flak jacket.

  “No you shouldn’t,” Salah ad-Din said, and shot the soldier through the chest.

  The high priest’s path of escape continued there.” Salah ad-Din pointed to the far wall. “That is where he hid the one treasure Titus sought.”

  “Why should I help you find where the tunnel continues? So you can finish stripping the Mount of all Judeo-Christian artifacts, too?” Cianari’s voice shook with emotion. He watched a bulldozer collide with one of the cavern walls. “I am an archaeologist. Not a butcher.”

  “Precisely the reason I chose you,” Salah ad-Din said calmly. He pointed at the deep gashes in the cavern’s far wall. “You can tell we’ve had little success.”

  “Get me out of here,” Cianari grunted.

  “To leave now, Professor,” Salah ad-Din said, “is to ignore the priceless opportunity of this search.”

  “An opportunity to rape sacred strata that date to our patriarchs?”

  “An opportunity to save them,” Salah ad-Din said. “It is only in the absence of your expertise”—he motioned to the giant tractor below—“that less delicate means have been necessary.”

  19

  The lock is titanium graphite, Comandante,” Brandisi said. “The officers don’t have the right equipment to clip the lock.”

  “Stand back,” Profeta ordered. The officers stepped behind him and Profeta switched off the safety of his Tanfoglio. Steadying the pistol with both hands, he fired at the door. The hollow blast echoed through the ruin, sending stray cats scurrying. The lock spun and fell, and the door jolted open.

  Inside the tunnel, natural light illuminated the high-tech excavation equipment against the walls.

  Profeta walked up to an umbrella-sized chrome device.

  “It’s a helium piston,” he said, impressed by the quality of equipment. “It pneumatically pushes out stone with rapid bursts of air rather than a jackhammer’s metal bit.”

  “To drill beneath the piazza without any noise,” Brandisi said.

  Profeta nodded. “We must move quickly. They may know we’re here.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Rufio thought.

  Profeta’s flashlight cut through the brown dust. The faint noises of the Piazza del Colosseo drifted through the storm drains above them.

  “This tunnel connects the gladiatorial barracks to the service passages beneath the Colosseum,” Profeta said.

  Rufio’s eyes darted nervously, his face drenched with sweat.

  “Are you okay, Rufio?” Profeta asked.

  “Of course, Comandante!” Rufio said, his nerves constraining his breath.

  He took the lead to project an air of confidence. But he knew better than anyone the danger they faced. The men responsible for this excavation would not hesitate to detonate the entire tunnel with them inside.

  The sounds of the piazza above faded, and only the sound of their own footsteps echoed in the tunnel. Profeta examined the excavated walls.

  “It’s as if the digging here was done by Jekyll and Hyde,” Profeta said.

  “Jekyll? You know who is responsible already?” Brandisi said in amazement. Nothing got past Il Profeta.

  “An English expression,” Profeta said. “There were two personalities at work here in this excavation. Over here”—Profeta’s flashlight scanned the pile of stacked rubble, sharply cracked bricks, and split stone—“the work is methodical, by someone with scholarly training, as though these pieces are to be removed for further study.” He moved his flashlight to another pile of rubble. “And here, the digging is as brutal as taking a chain saw to a fresco.”

  A high iron gate stood in the middle of the corridor ahead. It was slightly lower than the ceiling of arched brick.

  With an athleticism that surprised Rufio, Profeta grabbed its wrought iron and pressed his shoes on its rusted cross bar, his beard brushing the top of the gate as he lifted his other leg over and landed on the other side. Brandisi followed. Rufio lagged behind, frantically moving his flashlight’s beam down each corridor. He tried repeatedly to grab the fence’s crossbar but missed.

  “Rufio, you’re sure you are okay?” Brandisi asked from the other side of the gate.

  “Nothing is the matter!” Rufio snapped. “And don’t ask me again. That is an order, Sottotenenente.” Second Lieutenant. After a few more attempts, Rufio managed to climb over.

  When they caught up with the comandante, they found him crouched in the corridor, his right hand raised to quiet their approach.

  “Do you hear that?” Profeta whispered.

  Brandisi nodded. The echo of two voices reverberated down the corridor. The three of them drew their guns.

  20

  What on earth are you doing down here, Jonathan?” Emili demanded.

  Jonathan stood up, still winded. “I should ask you the same thing.”

  Emili took a step back. “Answer me, Jon.”

  Jonathan noticed she had moved farther away.

  “Wait, you don’t think I’m—”

  “Part of this? Why else would you be down here?”

  “Because I saw”—Jona
than stopped himself. “It’s all just conjecture, really.” He pulled from his pocket the torn Alitalia napkin where he had scribbled the fragment’s inscription in reverse. He held out the crumpled tissue. “Here,” he said.

  Emili stared at the napkin under her flashlight.

  “There was a message inside the stones,” Jonathan said.

  “Inside?”

  “The word illumina is imperative,” Jonathan said, “as in commanding an observer to shine a light onto the fragment. So I did. I shined a light onto the artifact’s face, and”—he halted for a moment—“some letters appeared in the fragment’s shadow. A steganographic message. ‘Error Titi.’ ”

  “A message inside the stone, of course,” Emili said, tilting her head back, eyes closed. “That explains the bright lamps Sharif and I saw hovering over the fragments in Jerusalem.”

  “You don’t know there’s a connection,” Jonathan said. “This excavation could just be tombaroli, some greedy thugs searching for artifacts.”

  Emili wiped away a small grove of mushrooms, revealing a wall carving of gladiatorial combat. “If these were tombaroli, Jon, this relief would have been cut out, boxed, and shipped to a London auction house by now. This excavation is different. They are not mercenaries. They are looking for something down here. A piece of information.”

  “Emili, even if that’s true, no, especially if that’s true, we need to report this illegal excavation immediately.”

  “Report it?” Emili said. “They’ll rope off these corridors for weeks. I’m not leaving.”

  “Emili, please, the carabinieri will—”

  Emili lifted her hand. The seven years of distance again crept between them. Her look hardened and she turned up her overcoat’s collar against the chill. She started down the corridor. “Good luck, Jon.”

  “You can’t even get to the end of these tunnels from here,” Jonathan called out behind her. During his doctoral work, he had toured the Colosseum’s underground with archaeologists, comparing the labyrinth ruins with ancient descriptions. “These passages stretch for a quarter-mile. You need someone who’s been down here before!” She continued walking. “Wait,” Jonathan said, shaking his head. He hurried toward her.

  She turned around and stared at him, smiling.

  “What?” Jonathan said. “What is it?”

  “I hate to think what these tunnels are going to do to those expensive shoes.”

  21

  Jonathan and Emili followed the corridor, snaking deeper underground. Bats swung overhead in the darkness. Emili’s flashlight revealed a fresh gash in the wall two feet in diameter.

  “These walls have been hacked to pieces.” She shook her head, disgusted at the brutality. “They used power sanders and electric saw blades. Idioti.”

  The passageway widened and began to slope upward.

  “We must be close to the gladiators’ gate,” Jonathan said. “The ground here is on a slant. Ancient sources describe gladiators entering the arena up a ramp.”

  He pointed to iron hooks on the walls. “This must be the spoliarium.”

  “The spoliarium?” Emili said.

  “These hooks were for gladiator carcasses, to drain their blood,” Jonathan said. “It was a profitable commodity. It was bottled and sold in the Roman Forum as a virility drink.”

  Emili stepped past him. “Ancient Rome’s Viagra.”

  Through a low archway, the tunnel opened to a chamber that looked quarried out of solid rock. The air was thick with dust; tufts of moss clung to the ceiling. Along the eastern wall of the chamber, a small stone parapet answered for a bench. Rows of grooved notches lined the walls, and Jonathan ran his hand across the names written above them.

  “What are all these notches?”

  “Victories,” Jonathan said solemnly. “Many prisoners fought for their freedom. Every notch was another victory inside the arena.” The notches were eerie remnants of humanity. Jonathan knew that for prisoners of Roman conquest, these were their last rites.

  An etching above the archway read, in deeply stenciled letters, “Dam-nato ad Gladium.”

  “Condemned to the gladiators,” Emili translated.

  “An ancient punishment reserved for war captives and traitors. ‘Con demned to the gladiators’ meant they faced trained gladiators with little or no armor. These prisoners fed ancient Rome’s insatiable desire for bloody spectacle.”

  Along the walls, ancient graffiti was etched in different scripts.

  “All these inscriptions are in different languages,” Jonathan said, his eyes moving across the wall. “Syriac, Aramaic, Greek, Latin. These are languages from the Gallic provinces conquered by the Roman army: Par thia, Gaul, Judea. This must be where prisoners and slaves waited before combat in the arena.” He turned to Emili. “We’re standing in the death row of ancient Rome.”

  An air of tragedy seemed to linger in the chamber. The inscriptions were so well preserved that both of them felt like intruders.

  “Just imagine soldiers dragging the prisoners of war from this room and hurling them before a crowd of sixty thousand bloodthirsty Romans.”

  Jonathan looked at the wall, his finger tracing the names. At one point, he stopped. “Look at this carved name. Aliterius Actoris.”

  “Aliterius the Actor,” Emili said.

  “That must refer to the stage actor Aliterius mentioned repeatedly in Josephus’s historical account.”

  “Talk about a bad theater review,” Emili said. “What’s his name doing down here?”

  “Aliterius was a favorite performer of Emperor Nero and used his political connections to influence decisions,” Jonathan said. “Later emperors, however, were not in his fan club.”

  “Apparently,” Emili said.

  Jonathan moved down the wall. “And this name, Clemens.” He turned to Emili. “He was a Roman consul executed for treason.” Jonathan stood in front of the next name. “Epaphroditus, a publisher of politically provocative works. He, too, was executed in the last days of Titus’s reign.” Jonathan read another name. “Beronike.”

  “As in the Berenice? The daughter of the last king of Jerusalem who became Emperor Titus’s mistress?”

  “Certainly possible. Many historical sources say Titus abruptly ended his relationship with Berenice. Public opinion rejected her because Titus brought her as a war prize from Jerusalem, and only then fell in love with her. Racine even wrote a tragic opera about the ill-fated love between Berenice and Titus. She may have been executed here in the Colosseum with the others.” Jonathan stepped back from the wall. “The inscriptions all look contemporaneous, and written in the same script.”

  “What do these names have in common?”

  Jonathan stared at the wall.

  “Spies,” he said after a moment. “They were all suspected spies in Titus’s palace.”

  “Spies? You’re joking.”

  “Take Aliterius,” Jonathan said, “the actor who used his political connections with Nero.”

  “Using celebrity clout for political purposes doesn’t make someone a spy,” Emili said. “Or your Department of Homeland Security would have arrested half of Hollywood already.”

  “Fair enough,” Jonathan agreed. “But there’s no record of this supposedly famous actor in any Roman sources other than in Josephus’s writings. And the word aliterius literally means ‘other,’ as in ‘alias’—or as they say in espionage operations, a ‘workname.’ Many historians think Aliterius was not an actor onstage, but in the theater of intelligence. He was executed shortly before Titus’s death.”

  “And Berenice?” Emili asked. “You’re suggesting Titus suspected his own mistress of being a spy?”

  “It would explain her sudden disappearance from the Roman history books, wouldn’t it?” Jonathan said. “Josephus repeatedly compliments Berenice, for her paedia. In the ancient world it meant ‘applied knowledge, ’ as in encyclopedia. But he probably wasn’t just saying she was smart. Some historians suspect that the term meant ‘s
trategy,’ or even ‘espionage.’ In Homer, Odysseus is described as having paedia when he returns to Ithaca in disguise.”

  Jonathan moved farther down the wall and stopped suddenly. “But I’m not even sure suspected espionage is the real connection among all these people.”

  “Then what was?”

  “Not what but who.”

  Jonathan moved closer to the last name on the wall, which was etched in a larger font. “Joseph ben Matthias,” he said slowly, staring at the inscription. “They all had him in common.”

  “Joseph ben Matthias? I have never heard of him.”

  “Yes, you have, but only by the Romanized name he took after he was freed as a prisoner of war from Jerusalem. Joseph added the Roman suffix ‘-us’ when he became a Roman citizen. This man,” Jonathan pointed at the wall, “was Flavius Josephus.”

  “You’re saying Josephus knew everyone in this room?”

  Jonathan walked back to the other end of the carved rock wall. “Aliterius secured private audiences for Josephus with Emperor Nero before Rome’s war with Jerusalem.” He stepped down the wall as if it were a blackboard. “Berenice did the same, giving Josephus access to Titus and his social circle.”

  “And Clemens?”

  “The lawyer who defended Josephus against allegations of spying on Rome.”

  “And Epaphroditus?”

  “His publisher. Josephus even dedicated his last book to him.”

  “But why would Titus have killed all those in his court who knew Josephus, unless—” She stopped and turned to him slowly. “Your graduate work, Jon,” she said. “I remember your research on Flavius Josephus—you suggested he was a spy in Titus’s palace.”

  “Emili”—Jonathan raised his hands—“I never proved it. Every scholar to study Josephus in the last five hundred years concluded he was a traitor to Jerusalem and loyal to Titus.”