The Last Ember Read online

“Every scholar except you. Back then you didn’t care if your thesis contradicted five hundred years of Josephus scholarship. You kept us all riveted—Sharif, Gianpaolo, and me—sharing your research at the Thermopolium.”

  The Thermopolium. Just hearing the name brought Jonathan back to the local bar near the academy. He could see the four of them sitting at a corner table beneath a nineteenth-century portrait of a battle-dressed Garibaldi and drinking the bar’s more controversial tribute to his 1859 rebellion against Vatican rule, a cocktail of tomato juice and vodka, still known as “Pope’s Blood.”

  Jonathan remembered Sharif pointing at the pages of Jonathan’s doctoral thesis that lay on the knotted-wood table. “This is the theory you’ve been keeping from us?” he said. “This is the idea you’ve been guarding like the walls of Ilium?”

  “Have you any idea what you’re suggesting?” Gianpaolo asked in his heavy Italian accent. “Josephus is known to everyone as the greatest traitor of the ancient world.”

  “And you’re suggesting it’s all a front,” Emili said, leaning forward, her “And you’re suggesting it’s all a front,” Emili said, leaning forward, her tone less skeptical than the others’. “An intelligence operation so successful, scholars remain in the dark even to this day.”

  “Jon, historians for nearly a thousand years have viewed Josephus’s defection to the Romans as an open-and-shut case,” Sharif added.

  “And it is,” Jonathan agreed. “Unless he was running an espionage network inside Rome after Jerusalem’s fall, for which the role of sycophantic court historian was the perfect cover.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Sharif said. “You’re saying Josephus wrote flattering histories of Titus as a front to operate in Rome as a double agent? Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”

  “It would be, except Josephus’s autobiography supports it. He isn’t new to the espionage game. Josephus used the unusual Greek word kataskopos to describe himself in his writing. It means ‘diplomat,’ but it also means ‘spy.’ ”

  “But your theory has a problem,” Gianpaolo argued. “How do you explain Josephus’s capture by the Romans?”

  “You’re not suggesting he arranged that,” Sharif said, putting down his glass of tomato juice. He had mentioned his religious restrictions to the bartender only once, and the elderly man provided him nonalcoholic versions without Sharif’s ever having to ask again. “That operation would have taken years to plan.”

  “And it did. It’s all recorded in Josephus’s writings . . . if you know how to read them. Remember that before Jerusalem declared an open rebellion against Roman rule, Josephus argued that the Temple would have no chance of surviving a siege by the Roman army. Why, then, after Jerusalem declared war, did Josephus suddenly volunteer to command troops in northern Israel directly in the path of General Vespasian’s troops? Sounds inconsistent, doesn’t it? He had no military experience whatsoever. His men would not stand a chance against Rome.”

  “So you’re saying he was vying to get taken prisoner before the Romans reached Jerusalem?” Emili said.

  “Exactly, and he had a strategy to do it. Only, it didn’t go quite as planned. Once Josephus and his troops arrived in northern Israel, he convinced the local council of elders of the Galilee to authorize the locals to plunder the Roman governor’s summer home for supplies. Josephus knew the plundering would bait Vespasian’s troops, bringing the Romans to their doorstep. So he told the elders to wait for his signal before authorizing the locals to plunder. Josephus needed time to ride out far enough in front of his troops so that he would be surrounded by the Romans alone.

  “So what went wrong?” Gianpaolo asked hurriedly.

  “The locals got greedy and, tempted by the supplies, sacked the governor’s house before Josephus’s signaled. Josephus panicked, and ordered all looting to stop immediately. He tried to prevent news of the premature plundering from reaching Vespasian, but it was too late, the bait was cast. Vespasian’s troops came thundering toward them and surrounded Josephus along with his men. In a scene dramatized countless times over the ages, Josephus’s men chose death in a cave in Galilee rather than capture. But Josephus, in a decision that chills most historians, turned himself over to the Romans.”

  “If you’re right,” Emili said, “imagine his guilt, watching his men kill themselves one by one. By the time the Romans recovered Josephus in that cave, he must have been literally covered in the blood of their mass suicide.”

  “That’s right, the operation was nearly blown at the start. But as planned, Josephus was still imprisoned and eventually recruited to become a personal translator to General Vespasian and his son, Titus. At that moment, the heart of his mission took effect. He had earned a position of trust that no military conquest could buy. He was inside the Roman tent, knowing the precise movements of the Roman siege of Jerusalem. In a way, Josephus was merely proving his favorite proverb, used in Book Five of The Jewish War. ‘Those who shine in physical combat can accomplish as much by intelligence.’ And remember the Greek word he used for intelligence, Sharif. Yperisia doesn’t mean ‘brains,’ it means ‘espionage.’ It’s the very word used today in Greece’s intelligence service.”

  “But if it was all a setup to get Josephus inside the Roman war machine,” Sharif asked, “why not attempt to save Jerusalem?”

  “Because her destruction was a fait accompli,” Jonathan said. “With fifty thousand Roman legionnaires surrounding the Temple walls, Josephus knew the city would be razed. But what if there was something else he could protect? A piece of information that, at all costs, he must transmit to future generations. Information that—to some extent—was just as precious as Herod’s Temple itself.”

  “Then he must put it in a document he knows will survive,” Emili said.

  “A flattering history of the Roman emperor, for example,” Gianpaolo suggested.

  “Bingo,” Jonathan said. “Josephus knew Titus obsessed over erasing any version of the past inconsistent with his own. So he knew he had to secretly communicate a truth through a flattering historical account of the emperor.”

  Jonathan sat back. “Flavius Josephus may have been Jerusalem’s most successful operative until the Mossad.”

  Jonathan?” Emili said inside the Colosseum’s tunnel. She shone her flashlight at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said, reorienting himself. He wiped the tunnel’s dripping water from his lapel and tie. The damp air beneath the Colosseum seemed colder than it had been a moment before.

  “At the academy you called it the greatest intelligence operation of the ancient world,” Emili marveled. Her flashlight trained back to the wall, following each name as though decoding an Egyptian hieroglyph. “And all of these people may have been part of it. A spy network revolving around an ancient historian inside Titus’s palace.”

  “I never proved the theory.”

  “These names could prove it for you, Jon.” She turned to him. “Although, if Titus discovered Josephus and killed anyone who helped him—and it seems that’s exactly what he did—then why isn’t Josephus’s mission common historical knowledge?”

  “Well, that was the genius of Josephus’s plan,” Jonathan said. “By the time Titus discovered him, Josephus had already penned countless pages of history lionizing the emperor. Titus could never publicize Josephus’s betrayal without calling into question the truth of his historical accounts.”

  “So he turned Titus’s obsession with history against him.”

  “Right, and whatever information he might have smuggled into the text, he knew the emperor would protect for all time.” Jonathan stopped, catching himself. “But like I said, it was just a theory. My research never should have gone as far as it did. Even if Josephus’s treason was all a setup, my theory never established a motive. Why create an espionage network after Jerusalem had fallen? The Temple was already burned, Jerusalem was a plundered ruin. What was left to save?”

  “Something powerful enough to make a
man like Josephus forsake his reputation for all time,” Emili said, gesturing at the walls around her. “Something to make an actor risk his fame, a publisher his legacy, and a mistress the comforts of palace life—all under the nose of the Roman frumentarii, the most ruthless secret police in the ancient world. Whatever it was they saved was more important than we can possibly imagine.”

  Emili crossed to the far side of the cavern and lifted a black tarpaulin off the wall. “Take a look at this. This excavation happened only a few days ago.”

  Jonathan could smell the freshly excavated dirt. He pulled the tarp back as cautiously as stripping back the bandage of a wound.

  Jonathan and Emili stared at an ancient relief chiseled directly into the wall’s stone. It was the carving of a tree with seven branches, framed by white uneven stones. In place of some tiles, there was shaved animal bone. Not the quality of polychrome mosaic tiles for an aristocrat’s portico, but remarkable for being created by prisoners trapped in the Colosseum.

  “It’s exquisite,” Emili said.

  With her preservationist’s eye, Emili could detect that the surface had been recently damaged with a highly concentrated acidic compound. “Some of these tiles were dissolved with nitric acid.”

  Jonathan leaned in. “Below the relief, there’s an inscription in a mix of ancient Hebraic script and Latin.”

  “‘Kodosh Arbor Ohr,’” he read aloud, using the rudimentary Hebrew vocabulary learned from his work with ancient texts. “Kodosh means ‘sacred.’ ”

  “Arbor, of course, is ‘tree,’ ” Emili said, translating the Latin.

  “And ohr, the second Hebrew word, means ‘light.’ ”

  “A sacred tree of light,” Emili said.

  “It’s cultic imagery. Trees were pagan references. Why would someone pay homage to a pagan image in Hebraic script? The war prisoners from Jerusalem were monotheistic, not pagan.”

  Jonathan moved his finger across the second line of inscription. “Domus aurea means ‘golden house.’ ”

  “As in Nero’s Golden Palace here in Rome?” Emili said. From her preservation work on the Oppian Hill, Emili had worked extensively in Nero’s sprawling golden palace. She often quoted the ancient architect Fabilius, who had called the structure “greedy for the impossible.” The Roman populace despised the palace’s excesses, forcing subsequent emperors to build over the palace within five years of Nero’s death, which inadvertently preserved it until its rediscovery in the Renaissance.

  Jonathan noticed carvings of birds surrounding the inscription of the words domus aurea.

  “Those are owls,” Jonathan said. “Wherever this inscription refers to, it must be a place to protect something, like a vault of some kind.”

  “And you get that from a couple of owls?” Emili said.

  “In the ancient world, owls symbolized protection. Our idea of owls as wise comes from an ancient association with an owl’s ability to see danger from afar. Roman armies used owls as a symbol on their armaments. Ancient Greece stamped owls on their money. Although it’s another pagan insignia at odds with these prisoners’ dedication to Jerusalem, the idea here of protecting something is unmistakable.”

  Emili reached into her satchel and removed a thin, black digital camera, only slightly larger than a credit card.

  “Is this a picture point?” Jonathan asked, teasing.

  Emili held the device a few feet from the wall and snapped a picture.

  “I’m documenting these illegal excavations.”

  She crossed to the other side of the room and was photographing the other walls when she noticed a carpet of steam rolling out of a low arch on the far wall of the room. Jonathan walked over and crouched beside her. Both of them noted the rank bacterial scent of the steam.

  “Must be a sewage leak through there,” Jonathan said, pointing through the archway.

  “No,” Emili said. “It’s a mix of methane and sulfur that gathers in Roman ruins when pollutants sink into the soil. We call it dragon breath.”

  “Pleasant,” Jonathan said.

  “There is one other issue,” Emili said. “The methane is highly combustible. In tight passageways, even a spark can ignite the air. There’s little oxygen, so the explosion lasts only a second or two, but long enough to kill every rodent or human around.”

  Emili stepped through the arch and waded through a low carpet of steam. She swept her flashlight’s beam side to side until she found the source of the steam. A large shattered pipe lay misaligned on the floor, exhaling a hot vapor like smoke around a fat cigar.

  “The steam pipe cracked,” Jonathan said over its hiss.

  “Not by itself,” Emili said, and pointed at a gash in the pipe where its steel skin was peeled back like a tin can. In the middle of the corridor, the steam heated the methane, creating a bluish flame that hovered a few inches above the tunnel floor.

  Emili began to cough. “The methane is mixing with the steam,” she said, hands on her knees. “Jon, this corridor is going to explode.”

  22

  Beneath the Colosseum, Profeta, Rufio, and Brandisi faced a choice: Three fornici, or passages, led in separate directions into the darkness.

  Rufio stood beside Profeta, his every breath tightening as his anxiety grew. He saw no explosives inside the corridor—yet.

  “Perhaps we should turn around,” he suggested.

  “The noise came from one of these passageways,” Profeta said. “Each of us will take one. If you hear anything, radio it in immediately.”

  “I’ll take this one,” Rufio said, pointing at the corridor leading toward the arena.

  “Okay, Brandisi, take the middle. I’ll take the far left.” They separated, moving slowly down different corridors, guns drawn.

  Now alone, Rufio leaned against the wall, no longer disguising the need to catch his breath. The magnitude of these excavations enraged him, not because of their destruction, but because they would certainly trigger a departmental investigation. Over the last week, he had gone to great lengths to conceal their excavation, once even intercepting a merchant’s complaint to the tourist bureau that one of Salah ad-Din’s work trucks was obstructing his café from the Colosseum’s tourist line. He should have known these men would betray him. At least the illicit excavators south of Naples honored their deals with the carabinieri, he thought, scanning the tunnel walls for explosives. As the corridor narrowed, his smoker’s lungs worked harder for air. Like a scuba diver with little oxygen remaining and yet compelled to descend deeper, Rufio moved forward, feeling the darkness thicken around him.

  He saw a flashlight strobe the wall.

  Rufio switched off the safety trigger guard of his nine-millimeter Glock. He knew that killing the first tombarolo in his path would raise him above suspicion in any departmental investigation. He brought his elbows to eye level to steady his aim.

  Jonathan and Emili hurriedly backtracked around the corridors’ tight turns. A dark stretch of tunnel opened up and they ran. The sound of a tour group above filtered down from the tourist deck. “The tourists,” Emili said, horrified. “We’ve got to evacuate the Colosseum.”

  “Ferma!” Rufio screamed. Freeze! He was standing thirty feet behind them.

  Jonathan and Emili scraped to a stop and ducked into a niche, their backs flat against the stone. The man was only yards away, his trembling beam of light growing larger as he approached.

  “Chi diavolo sei?” Rufio yelled. Who the hell are you? Jonathan and Emili could see the man inspecting each niche with his flashlight.

  “That’s the staircase I came down,” Emili whispered, pointing across the corridor.

  Emili moved silently into the darkness and made it to the stairwell. Jonathan began to follow when Rufio illuminated the corridor. He darted back into the niche, and was now separated from Emili by the corridor’s thick cloud of dust floating in the beam of Rufio’s flashlight.

  “Go!” Jonathan whispered to the other side. “I will meet you up there!”


  Emili shook her head. “But how will you—”

  “Just go!” Jonathan said. Emili disappeared up the steps into the darkness.

  Rufio swung his flashlight side to side across the corridor, and Jonathan could now make out the man as he moved down the hallway, the red sash trim of his blue uniform pants, the white leather holster of his gun, and his officer’s visor cap worn low. A carabinieri officer, Jonathan thought, relieved.

  “Agente,” Jonathan said in Italian, stepping into the corridor.

  “Chi sei tu!” Rufio yelled. He wheeled his flashlight toward Jonathan and, in his other hand, aimed his pistol at point-blank range. In the backlight of the harsh beam Jonathan could see in Rufio’s bloodshot eyes an animal-like fury, a man no longer in control. His gun bobbled so wildly Jonathan thought it might go off by accident.

  “I can explain,” Jonathan said quietly in Italian, raising his hands. He motioned toward faint daylight of the stairwell. “But it’s not safe down here.”

  “This was not part of our deal,” Rufio yelled, waving his gun in the air. “None of this was!”

  Jonathan stood frozen in the gray spill light of the storm drain above him, feeling its draft of fresh air. He kept his arms half up, elbows bent. Deal? What deal? Jonathan noticed the man shook uncontrollably.

  “I don’t know what you’re—” Jonathan said.