The Last Ember Page 12

  “Get on your knees!” Rufio straightened his arm, holding the gun.

  Jonathan lowered himself, dropping one knee and then the other. “There isn’t time,” Jonathan said.

  “They discovered the warehouse!” Rufio screamed. “Tell Salah ad-Din it’s over.”

  “Warehouse?” Jonathan said, sensing a fury in the cop that was more personal than professional. “You have me mistaken for—”

  But Rufio’s foot interrupted Jonathan, crushing into his stomach. Jonathan doubled over and Rufio bent down, taunting him. “Where I come from in Sicily, there are rules,” Rufio said, landing another kick into the small of Jonathan’s back. Jonathan fell over, for a moment wondering if the blow had cracked his spine. He struggled to his knees. “But Salah ad-Din plays by his own rules, doesn’t he?” The officer punctuated the question with a swift stroke to Jonathan’s rib cage that was so hard it actually lifted him an inch off the ground. Rufio grabbed Jonathan’s hair, nestling the shaft of his gun under his jaw. “Well, I have rules, too,” Rufio said. “And you tell him this isn’t Jerusalem; this is Rome.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jonathan wheezed. “Or who . . . Salah ad-Din—”

  “Stop,” Rufio yelled, “lying!” and yanked Jonathan’s head further back.

  “I came from”—Jonathan gasped for air—“the tourist decks.”

  As though trying to make sense of the last of that statement, Rufio blinked rapidly, realizing he had confessed to a random man. In the gray light, Jonathan saw that Rufio’s hands grew even more tremulous.

  The two-way function of Rufio’s mobile phone began to crackle, picking up reception from the street grate above them. An officer’s frantic voice came through, but was too choppy to make out. Rufio dragged Jonathan to his feet, not removing the gun from his neck, and walked him under the grate. “Alessandro!” Rufio’s two-way radio blared to life with Brandisi’s panicked tone. “Get out of there! The bomb squad said the tunnel is filled with methane!”

  Rufio grabbed the radio, but dropped his flashlight, its beam rolling on the dirt like a distant headlight. He lowered his gun, crouching to pick up the light. Jonathan seized the opportunity and bolted into the darkness. Almost instantly, he felt the force of the officer’s clumsy tackle from behind. Both men hit the ground, rolling. Jonathan slammed Rufio’s arm against the dirt-packed floor and his pistol fell out of his hand. Jonathan swiped it into the darkness.

  Rufio reached for a small Taser gun on his belt. A blue filament of light flashed, but Jonathan pushed it downward into Rufio’s shirt. The officer’s torso convulsed, his chest flying upward in the strained arc of defibrillation. His tight grip on Jonathan’s shirt faded as he collapsed, suddenly limp, arms splayed on the floor.

  Jonathan stumbled up to his feet and ran through the corridor, feeling a stinging pain in his left hand. He noticed that he had cut himself across his knuckles, but he did not remember how.

  In the corridor, Rufio made it to his knees, driving his palms into his eye sockets from the headache after the Taser’s shock.

  Jonathan dashed into the open-air maze of service passages that once supported the arena floor. From this part of the Colosseum’s basement, he could see the sun flashing through the tight brick passages. Jonathan stared upward, trying to find a way out. He could hear the clicking of the exit turnstiles above him, a tour being given in Russian. A child having a tantrum. Never had Jonathan craved the twenty-first century more.

  Ahead of him, Jonathan saw a multilevel scaffolding that supported a partial reconstruction of the arena floor. He heaved himself upward to scale it, his hands gripping its metal pipes one after the other. Steep aluminum stairs connected the transoms of the scaffold, and Jonathan sprinted up them toward the tourist decks. A breeze of fresh air off the Palatine Hill confirmed that he was finally aboveground. He emerged in the center of the arena, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the sky’s bright gauzy overcast. He walked along the highest plank of the scaffolding toward the arena’s low railing, where a tourist group stood on the other side, fortunately with their backs to him. Jonathan stood for a moment to catch his breath.

  Suddenly, a hand reached up from below and grabbed his ankle, then yanked him downward with such force that Jonathan hit the scaffold’s wooden plank, stomach first. He shook his whole body to free his leg, struggling to stay on the plank with one knee. It was an unrelenting force, like Hades himself pulling Jonathan back into the underworld.

  Jonathan looked down, and he saw a carabiniere uniform covered in dirt, a face contorted in pain, eyes still blood-red from the tunnel’s fumes. Rufio had chased Jonathan up the scaffolding.

  “Fermati ades—” Rufio began, but did not finish.

  The muffled noise of a distant cannon blasted somewhere below. Its rumble grew louder as the reverberation took on a physical force, violently shaking the metal piping of the scaffold. The sound ripened into a deafening blast as one of the arches beneath the arena spit a wide tongue of fire that quickly extinguished itself in a geyser of smoke.

  The gift shop’s glass wall shattered, ending the crowd’s terrified silence like a starting pistol. “Irt!” a German guide shrieked. Earthquake! Families that moments before had obediently moved around the arena circumference now clawed each other out of the way. Parents carried bawling children under both arms as they stampeded toward the turnstiles.

  Jonathan saw that Rufio had lost his grip and fallen backward onto a lower wooden plank of the scaffold, where he lay unconscious in the smoke. Instinctively, Jonathan climbed back down the piping, lifted Rufio’s arm over his shoulder, and walked him up the steep flight of stairs to the top planks. Jonathan folded Rufio over the arena railing like a rag, the officer’s arms dangling in front, and then swung his own legs over and climbed onto the modern herringbone brick of the tourist deck.

  “Jonathan!” Emili ran against the crowds, spotting him.

  The shock of the last few minutes left Jonathan’s mind scattered, and he just stared straight ahead.

  “You’re right,” he said, dazed. “It looks like dragon breath.”

  23

  Lieutenant Rufio was found inside the Colosseum?” Profeta asked, rushing past a wedge of carabinieri cars, their blue lights flashing silently outside the turnstiles. The ruin had been closed for thirty minutes now. Police tape barricaded the surrounding piazza, from the Arch of Constantine across the Via Sacra. Uniformed police officers streamed through the turnstiles. Firefighters already filled the inner corridors of the Colosseum to inspect the tourist walkways and the open areas beneath the arena floor.

  Profeta stepped inside the Colosseum’s glass-enclosed ticket office. Rufio sat on a small refrigerator leaning against an espresso machine. A medic applied some salve and gauze over a cut along his temple.

  “Alessandro,” Comandante Profeta said, placing a hand on Rufio’s shoulder. “We thought we’d lost you.”

  “Just a few bruises, Comandante,” Rufio said.

  “You have a description?”

  “Male, early thirties, over two meters. He was wearing a suit.”

  “A suit?”

  “A dark suit and cravat,” Rufio said. “I chased him up the scaffolding to the tourist deck.”

  One of the supervising guards motioned to a back room, “Comandante, the surveillance tapes are ready.”

  Profeta walked past a wall of charging audio phones and entered the security office. Six security guards were playing back the dotty images of the surveillance cameras. They huddled over the security desk’s small blue screens, viewing various camera angles of the Colosseum’s interior. The room had become an on-site triage post for the Colosseum’s security staff. Profeta stood in the back, peering at the screens through the leaves of a fern atop a file cabinet.

  Profeta spoke from the back of the room. “Freeze that frame.” He stepped forward. “Rewind just a bit, right there.”

  The young guard working the console pressed a button and the image
rapidly moved backward. The frozen frame was a gritty black-and-white image, but clear enough to make out the features of a young woman wearing a fitted herringbone coat. The image showed her breaking from the crowd and disappearing into a dark arch.

  “Rewind the tape again, please,” Profeta said. The woman glanced to both sides before darting into the arch.

  “Again, please,” Profeta said. “Slow it down.” The woman moved slower this time. “Which arch is that?”

  The guard zoomed in above the arch. “No number, Comandante,” the guard said. “That arch has no number.”

  “As soon as the smoke clears, I want a team down there,” Profeta said. He pointed at the screen. “And send a forensics team to search for her remains.”

  Within minutes, police tape hung between the rock walls of the arch beside the tourist deck, and Profeta climbed down the steep stone stairs into the brick maze beneath the Colosseum. Harsh white lights illuminated the corridor, and large fans cleared the area of smoke. The smell of burned clay was overpowering.

  “This is where he attacked me, Comandante,” Rufio said, pointing to the floor. “I was coming down the corridor.”

  Profeta said nothing, feeling his way along the burned fresco wall. He crouched, studying the broken section of piping along one wall. It was always a criticism of the comandante that he dedicated himself to menial tasks when lower-ranking officers were willing to conduct physical inspections of a crime scene.

  Profeta knelt and leaned down, his spectacles nearly touching the charred section of pipe.

  “No wonder you couldn’t breathe, Lieutenant,” Profeta said. “You were breathing almost pure gas.”

  “Comandante,” Brandisi said from the stairwell, “one of the guards just identified the woman on the surveillance camera.”

  Profeta hurried back upstairs to the security room behind the ticket counter. Among the uniformed officers sat a young Colosseum guard. He stared mournfully at the screen, his index finger touching the glass.

  “Dr. Emili Travia,” the guard said when he saw Profeta and the others. “A preservationist from ICCROM.”

  “ICCROM?” Rufio said.

  “The International Centre for Conservation in Rome,” the guard said, staring blankly at a wall of charging audio phones. “Her staff has been assisting the preparation for the World Heritage Committee opening ceremony tomorrow.”

  24

  Jonathan and Emili walked in the shadows of a side street off the Campo dei Fiori, a section of Rome built up in the Middle Ages. Its narrow cobbled streets were now home to bohemian art galleries and bars. The festivities from the night before had left empty beer bottles and cigarette butts scattered across the cobbles.

  At one pub, a crowd squeezed in front of a television mounted above a bar. On the screen, a reporter was broadcasting live from the Colosseum, news vans gathering behind her. The broadcaster recounted the unexplained explosion beneath the ruin, interviewing a young British tourist who had been in the Colosseum at the time and was still nursing a nosebleed. Amateur digital footage caught the smoke-filled stampede. Early indications, the broadcaster announced, indicated a steam pipe accident. Municipal authorities were investigating.

  “Accident?” Emili said, offended. “They planned that explosion!”

  “They must have been excavating under the Colosseum for weeks to uncover that inscription,” Jonathan said distantly.

  “And to destroy it,” Emili said.

  They passed some carabinieri officers sharing a cigarette break with leather-clad teenagers. As they walked by, Jonathan pulled down a newly purchased Roma soccer cap over his face.

  “We need to get to the American embassy on Via Veneto,” he said. “Right now.”

  “And tell them what, exactly? That you’ve found an illegal excavation while trying to solve a first-century riddle? Or that you assaulted a uniformed police officer, nearly killing him?”

  “Assaulted? He attacked me! I told you, that officer was involved in the excavation. He nearly killed me.”

  Emili looked unsurprised. “Nearly all illegal excavations in this country are the product of municipal corruption, Jon.” She remembered her first ICCROM fieldwork in the hills of Capri where an entire town had been bribed to permit an illegal excavation in the town square. “Besides, I’m sure that officer will have a different recollection of what happened. Whenever he regains consciousness, that is.”

  “He mistook me for one of the tombaroli,” Jonathan said, trying to beat the ash off his soiled suit jacket. “He was going on about some man, Salah ad-Din, something about—”

  Emili stopped walking. “What did he say? Tell me the words exactly.”

  “I can’t give you a transcript, Emili. The guy was using my torso as a soccer ball.”

  “He said that name, Salah ad-Din?”

  “Yes. And that I should give him a message that this isn’t Jerusalem, that there are different rules here.”

  Emili began to walk again, taking the information in.

  “Do you know who that man is?” Jonathan asked.

  “Salah ad-Din? No one does. Not his true identity, at least. The name is a pseudonym. Our informants in Jerusalem have said he is running a large illegal excavation beneath the Temple Mount. We cross-checked the name with Interpol, and they have been tracking him for two years, attributing excavations beneath Istanbul and Calabria to his operation. Interpol doesn’t have a single picture of him. Not even a sample voice recognition.”

  “The American embassy can help,” Jonathan said.

  “Like they helped you seven years ago?” Emili asked. “Go to the authorities again and you’ll have ruined another career.”

  Jonathan knew she was right. Dulling and Pierce feared publicity like an infectious disease. Not to mention that the man who attacked him beneath the Colosseum was the authorities.

  “Emili,” Jonathan said, “even if you’re right that illegal excavations a thousand miles apart are connected—and I’m not saying they are—you don’t know what this man, Salah ad-Din, is looking for.”

  “No, I don’t. But whatever it is, it’s been sought for hundreds of years.”

  “How do you know that?”

  From her dusty satchel, Emili removed an oversized souvenir guide, Rome Past and Present, a thin book of transparent sheets illustrating modern Rome superimposed upon the ancient.

  “A guidebook?” Jonathan said, raising an eyebrow. “This man is excavating for what he can find in a guidebook?”

  “Open it.”

  Emili had protectively wedged the sketch Orvieti had given her between two transparent sheets. Jonathan removed the nineteenth-century sketch of the Colosseum and carefully held it up to the late-morning sunlight. “This arch has no number,” Jonathan said. “That’s how you knew where to go beneath that arch of the Colosseum.”

  “It was done by a member of Napoleon’s excavation team at the Colosseum in 1809, Giuseppe Valadier. He never told Napoleon or the Church about this sketch, and instead, secretly bequeathed it elsewhere.”

  “And you think he found the inscription we just saw?”

  “Yes, and somehow knew it was important enough for those prisoners to carve moments before their death.”

  “Emili, there’s no way to prove that.”

  “That’s because we don’t know the meaning of the inscription. It could tell us what he was protecting,” Emili said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Josephus. It all comes back to the same question you tackled back at the academy. Could there have been a mission important enough for him to go undercover for a lifetime? That message you saw carved inside the Forma Urbis, Titus’s mistake, suggests there was. A deception in Titus’s court so important that members of Rome’s aristocracy—Berenice, Aliterius, Epaphroditus, and Josephus himself—gave their lives to protect it. We don’t know what Titus’s mistake was. Not yet. But there’s a band of thugs massacring ruins beneath the Colosseum and Temple Mount to find out.”


  They walked in silence for a moment. Jonathan’s mind flashed to the academy library years before. He could hear Sharif Lebag’s voice as if he were still sitting beside him. History is written in fire, Jon. Jonathan remembered Sharif’s energy, how his hands hovered above the Latin text of tawny parchments to uncover their hidden meaning, as though feeling for something still warm. And to keep it aflame, he would add, smiling, we just need one ember.

  “I never should have taken the research so far,” Jonathan said, shaking his head.

  “You did the best you could,” Emili said. “What did Euripides say in Heraclidae? ‘Leave no stone unturned.’ ”

  Jonathan stopped walking. “That play was a tragedy, Emili.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, everybody dies.”

  “Okay, I forgot that,” she said, turning around. “So look at it this way, the stones are already turned. Your research from the academy—”

  “Was just a theory. That was graduate school. This is real. That explosion was real, that carabinieri officer was very, very real. Even if that wall reveals what those prisoners died for, we probably couldn’t interpret it. Cults in imperial Rome did not even worship trees by the first century. The Mithraic cults focused on animals.” Jonathan was silent a moment. “Either way, the relief should have reflected a monotheistic heritage, not pagan iconography. It will take time to decipher.”

  “Time I don’t have,” Emili said. “The World Heritage Committee convenes tomorrow. To petition the committee for an emergency inspection beneath the Temple Mount, I need facts, detailed allegations as to why Salah ad-Din and his men are excavating. I don’t need the carabinieri, Jon. To decipher that inscription, I need an expert on early mysticism.”

  “An expert on early mysticism? Where in the world would you find—” Jonathan stopped, interrupted by his own thought. He pulled a business card from the inside pocket of his dusty suit jacket. “Chandler Manning.”

  “The librarian from the academy?”