The Last Ember Page 2

  Beneath the liquid’s surface, her supple white skin was as pristine as a fossil preserved in amber. Profeta knew of ancient Rome’s embalming techniques of using honeyed cinnamon, wood tar, and smoldered cedar oil, which Pliny the Elder called cedrium, to keep microbes at bay, but this level of preservation from the ancient world seemed impossible.

  A small circular tattoo of Latin and Greek words encircled the corpse’s navel in a deep burgundy script.

  “Phere nk umbilicus orbis terrarum,” Profeta said, reading the tattoo aloud. “Victory in the navel of the world,” he translated.

  “What kind of sick hoax is this, Comandante?” Lieutenant Rufio asked.

  But Profeta did not hear him. He leaned over the corpse, searching for a smallpox vaccine scar below the right shoulder, or dental work on her small, uneven teeth, or signs of having worn footwear on her calloused feet—any indication of modernity. There was none. “Rufio,” Comandante Profeta said, “get a coroner in here.”

  3

  Outside the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem, four men on a scaffold wore stolen restoration jumpsuits with “UNESCO” printed across the back. Their forged and laminated identification tags bore the seal of the Jordanian Hashemite Cultural Ministry, which gave them permission to restore the shrine’s exterior medieval blue tiles. But restoration was not their intent. Their muffled drills whirled through the marble latticework around a second-story window to access the sanctuary below. They worked with the well-rehearsed efficiency of bank robbers burrowing into a vault.

  “Sheikh Salah ad-Din, we have removed the window,” said Ahmed Hassan, a talented young bomb maker.

  Salah ad-Din did not acknowledge the boy, keeping his gaze on three laptop computers fixed to the base of the scaffolding. He ran his hand over the black stubble that carpeted his head. His copper complexion, thin, straight nose, and light, chrome-colored eyes made him appear more European than Arab. His meticulously clean-shaven face and wired spectacles gave him a thoughtful, academic air, as if he might have been a young faculty member at Nazir or Gaza University. He did not resemble a man whom Interpol had hunted for years and who was known in the organization’s files only by his nom de guerre, Salah ad-Din, the name of the twelfth-century Islamic warrior who defended Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

  Grid images of the Dome’s interior octagonal structure rotated on the laptop screens. To Salah ad-Din, the Dome of the Rock’s perfect mathematical proportions were far more important than the shrine’s religious significance. Those proportions had determined the length of rope required for his team to rappel inside.

  With military focus, Salah ad-Din checked the black digital chronograph on his arm: 1:13 a.m. “We must enter immediately,” he said. “Come, Professor.”

  “We are not ready yet,” replied Professor Gustavo Cianari, a balding little man. He nervously removed his glasses, which revealed eyes as beady and squinting as a nocturnal animal’s. “The passage in Josephus does not reveal the artifact’s location, only that it was moved through a Hidden Gate.”

  “Which is why I rescued you from your academic dungeon in Rome,” Salah ad-Din said. “You are perhaps the only living scholar in the world who could have deciphered the hidden gates’ location from the tattoo on that woman.”

  “That woman was the last princess of Jerusalem,” Professor Cianari said, offended by his employer’s disrespectful tone. “She chose death in the Colosseum, rather than reveal the meaning of umbilicus orbis terrarum. ‘The Navel of the World.’ You saw her level of royal preservation.”

  “And as of ten minutes ago, so have the carabinieri. Your Italian police just discovered our research facility in Rome. We must find the artifact tonight.” Salah ad-Din stepped toward the small man. “Think of it, Professor. An artifact for which Titus conquered all of Jerusalem, but still failed to bring back to Rome.”

  Reluctantly, the professor followed Salah ad-Din up the scaffolding and through the spade-shaped hole where the arabesque window had been. Now inside the shrine, they stood on an interior ledge forty feet above the sanctuary floor. The professor’s trepidation gave way to awe at the grandeur of the Dome of the Rock’s interior. The vast octagonal sanctuary resembled an orientalized Saint Peter’s Basilica, a cavernous pavilion of inlaid marble walls and decoration funded by centuries of Arab conquest. Rays of moonlight checkered through latticework windows and converged on the gilded shrine’s most precious treasure: the Foundation Stone, or Al-Sakhra, which was the natural summit of the Temple Mount—a large promontory of bedrock that stretched thirty square feet inside a protective fence and was further secured by the red crossbeams of motion detectors hovering above it.

  Cianari’s archaeology students in Rome never ceased to be astonished that the enclosed floor of bedrock was more precious than the gold dome above it. “The world’s largest encased jewel,” Professor Cianari called the thirty-square-foot stone. It was the most sacred ground on earth to three religions: the very spot described in Genesis where, according to Christianity and Judaism, the patriarch Abraham bound his son Isaac at the sacrificial altar and where one thousand years later Solomon would build the Holy of Holies of the First Temple. A rectangular depression in the center of the rock is said to have been the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant before the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. And, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad ascended to heaven from this rock, and the faithful still view the embedded hoofprint of El Burak, the horse that transported him.

  “There, ‘The Navel of the World,’” Salah ad-Din said, pointing at a hole in the southern end of the rock. “When the Roman troops breached the Temple walls in A.D. 70, the priest moved the artifact through there into a tunnel beneath the stone.” He spoke as though seeking a fugitive who had escaped only hours before.

  “Unfortunately, whatever lies beneath the Foundation Stone is inaccessible,” the professor said, secretly relieved that this man’s obsessive quest might finally come to an end. “The motion detectors prevent any access to the stone from the ground.”

  “From the ground, Professor,” Salah ad-Din said, “but not from above.”

  Ahmed assisted Salah ad-Din to slip his legs through a Velcro harness and secured a high-tensile-strength rope through a belay device.

  “You intend to rappel through the stone?” Professor Cianari said.

  As his answer, Salah ad-Din stepped off the ledge and descended through the sanctuary’s dim air as though climbing down the rungs of moonlight. The professor watched, in horror and fascination, as Salah ad-Din floated through the center of the Dome, moving forty feet downward and ultimately through the aperture in the Foundation Stone—easily avoiding the flickering red lasers that protected the sacred rock’s perimeter. From the ledge the professor could hear the harness jangle as Salah ad-Din touched down inside the crypt beneath the stone.

  The professor heard the sound of imams approaching the outer doors of the sanctuary. The empty harness returned to the ledge. Two men brusquely grabbed him, shoved his stout legs into the harness, and lowered him after the sheikh. As the professor descended, he noticed, to his amazement, that the Foundation Stone’s surface was more textured than he ever imagined. Crevices in the ancient surface undulated like frozen storm waves, as if making visual the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition that from this single stone, the entire earth expanded in all directions.

  And Cianari now regretted that it was he who had led Salah ad-Din here, to the exact center of the world. Umbilicus Orbis Terrarum.

  Professor Cianari tightened his grip on the harness, moving through the opening of the stone. Beneath this sacred rock, unborn souls were said to gather, and the sudden sound of whispers chilled him to the core.

  He disappeared through the hole in the Foundation Stone and his breathing shortened, as though somehow knowing he was forever parting with the world above him.

  4

  Jonathan stepped out of the sedan into Piazza Navona. The tourists, cari
caturists, and performers who gave the piazza its life during the day were long asleep, the outdoor tables stacked and chained for the night. The bristles of a street-cleaning spazzatrice hissed past.

  He walked across the floodlit palazzo and soon recognized the baroque façade of Dulling’s Rome office. He had seen it in an article of Architectural Digest, displayed in the firm’s lobby in New York. The firm took pride in the palazzo’s sixteenth-century design by a wealthy papal family, and its five ornate floors, which had been the scene of numerous banquets for popes and Roman nobility throughout the centuries.

  The palazzo’s giant doors were as tall as a drawbridge, and two feet thick, of iron-studded oak. Jonathan lifted the knocker, an angry wolf’s head sinking its fangs into a circle of brass, but before it dropped, the massive doors began to shutter and creak, opening slowly.

  Jonathan walked into the palazzo’s column-lined courtyard, the gravel’s crunch echoing with his every step. The only trace of modernity was overhead, and understated: The red light of a surveillance camera blinked beneath a sculpted marble angel perched above an archway. The lens trained on Jonathan as he moved across the courtyard.

  The latest-model BlackBerry rattled in a holster on his waist. A text message prompt appeared on the color screen.

  To: Jonathan Marcus

  From: Bruce Tatton (Managing Partner Europe)

  He clicked the message.

  Upstairs. Conference Room.

  Jonathan remembered how the ancient historian Suetonius described Roman generals transmitting their battle plans to their field officers by hiding them inside clusters of grapes. The firm’s partners sent their marching orders via BlackBerry. More the world changes, Jonathan thought, more it stays the same.

  At the end of the courtyard’s northern colonnade, a grand oak door had been left ajar.

  He climbed a marble staircase, and on the second floor, a hallway lined with sculptured niches led to a salone refitted as an executive conference room.

  Beneath a crystal chandelier, Bruce Tatton leaned over a deeply polished oak table, his knuckles flat on it, as though he were braving a gust of wind. He was a solidly built, middle-aged American, with a full head of expensively cut gray hair carefully combed back, and thick black eyebrows. His black satin bow tie and the matching moiré silk suspenders under his dinner jacket suggested he had been pulled out of an important affair to put out a fire at the office.

  At Tatton’s side was Andrew Mildren, a Dulling and Pierce associate formerly of the London office. Mildren was seated at the table, looking as obedient as a terrier. He was wearing a smart gray pinstripe suit and a massive Windsor knot of navy satin. Mildren was a few years senior to Jonathan and was gunning for partner. In every law firm, one associate makes an art of defending the devil. Mildren’s inspired defense of a firearm manufacturer (safety-latch malfunctions) had recently persuaded a London High Court to dismiss the case with prejudice. A great victory for the Dulling London office and the European firearms market. Rumor was that it earned Mildren an additional six-figure bonus—in sterling.

  In front of the conference table, in a glass display case, lay two ancient marble fragments. They were large, each three feet across, and fit together like an oversized jigsaw puzzle. Bruce Tatton hauled the coattails of his dinner jacket to one side and rounded the conference table toward Jonathan.

  “You were the bloody Rome Prize winner in classics, Marcus,” Tatton began without preamble, pointing accusingly at the marble fragments. “Recognize them?” With a certain violence, he unknotted his bow tie so that it dangled from his neck.

  Jonathan approached the ancient stone fragments, his eyes not leaving them.

  “They’re fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae,” he said.

  “Meaning what?” Mildren snapped.

  “ ‘ The Form of the City of Rome’ is the literal translation from Latin. It was an enormous stone map of Rome carved in the late second century A.D. that spanned more than a hundred feet in diameter.” Jonathan moved his hand above the marble engravings. “You can still see the street markings of ancient Rome. These curved concentric markings were an arena of some kind.”

  “One hundred feet in diameter?” Mildren said. “Bloody huge map.”

  “It was,” Jonathan said. “Covered an entire building wall in the Roman Forum. Most early scholars thought the size was a myth, an exaggeration, until the Renaissance, when pieces of the map slowly began to resurface, found among building materials in the garden patios of Roman nobility and stairway decorations inside the loggia of Saint Peter’s.”

  “Your expertise in classics, Marcus, has become”—Tatton lifted his eyes to the ceiling mural—“relevant to our client who owns this artifact. Can you recognize which part of Rome these fragments depict?”

  “It must have been a large amphitheater of some kind, most likely the Colosseum. These rectangular grooves inside the lines must be the gates.”

  Mildren slid a thick folder across the conference table. It stopped abruptly under Jonathan’s hand.

  “That is the fascicolo, or case file, for those fragments.”

  “What case?” Jonathan said. “I haven’t received any information.”

  “Our client anonymously loaned these two fragments to the Capitoline Museum,” Tatton explained as though setting the rules of an athletic match. “The Italian Cultural Ministry alleges they were stolen from the Italian state archives in Rome decades ago. The ministry’s expert witness is a UN official who claims to have seen these fragments last year, stamped with the very words that strike fear into the heart of every antiquity collector, ‘Archivio di Stato,’ meaning from the state archives.”

  “Where did he see these fragments?”

  “She,” Tatton said. “She claims to have seen these fragments while investigating an illegal excavation in Jerusalem near the Temple Mount.”

  “Their witness saw these fragments exactly?” Jonathan asked. “The Forma Urbis shattered into thousands of pieces when the Goths sacked Rome in A.D. 455 and scattered them across the ancient world. Scholars discover new fragments every decade or so.”

  “The UN official identified an inscription on the underside of the fragments,” Tatton said.

  Jonathan crouched and looked up through the display case’s glass bottom. Three Latin words were carved roughly into the underside of the stone.

  “‘Tropaeum Josepho Illumina,’” he read aloud, his voice sounding cramped under the display case.

  “Can you translate it?”

  “Tropae means ‘monument’ or ‘trophy.’ ” He recalled the origins of the word, how ancient soldiers staked the ground where a battle would “trope,” or turn in their favor. “Illumina means ‘revealed,’ ” he continued, “or, literally, ‘brought to light.’ The inscription is broken off there at the end, but it was probably illuminatum, meaning ‘revealed,’ as in, ‘A monument revealed to . . .’ ”

  “To whom?” Tatton said, folding his arms expectantly.

  “Josephus,” Jonathan said, standing back up. “A monument to Josephus revealed.”

  “You did your graduate work on Flavius Josephus, I’m told,” Tatton said. “At the American Academy in Rome.”

  “Years ago. The research wasn’t worth very much, I’m afraid.”

  “Worth the cost of a first-class plane ticket from New York, wasn’t it?” Mildren said brittlely. “Take your jacket?”

  Jonathan gladly removed his damp suit jacket, but Mildren did not take it. Rather he motioned vaguely toward an upholstered chair at the conference table. Jonathan stepped forward but could not bring himself to put the wet jacket on the antique fabric. He tucked it under his arm instead.

  Tatton picked up a manila file on the conference table and read aloud. “Rhodes scholarship in first-century Roman literature and a pre-doctoral Rome Prize for your thesis on the ancient historian Flavius Josephus.” Tatton looked up. “Indulge me if I have a question or two.”

  Jonathan pointed to the fragment.
“I’m not even certain this inscription refers to Flavius Josephus,” he said. “We have only a partial name on this inscription, and, besides, the fragment here mentions a monument. The historian Flavius Josephus wasn’t very popular in the ancient world. A monument in his name would have been unlikely.”

  “Why?” Mildren asked.

  “Few ancient authors have been as vilified as Flavius Josephus,” Jonathan answered. “He was a Jewish general who defended Jerusalem, but once captured by the Romans, later handed over information to help them breach Jerusalem’s city walls. It didn’t help his historical reputation that Emperor Vespasian, to thank him, awarded him Roman citizenship after the war. His historical account of Rome’s siege of Jerusalem became an instant best seller in the Roman world. The age-old question is, Was his eyewitness account from the perspective of a political realist or a murderous traitor? His credibility is questionable.”

  “Then Josephus has something in common with the UN official who says she saw these fragments,” Mildren said. “Her credibility is questionable, too. She claims to have seen the identifying stamp, ‘Archivio di Stato,’ on this part of the fragment.” Mildren pointed at the smooth end of the marble slab. “On our fragments, no stamp,” he said proudly.

  “But that portion has been sanded smooth,” Jonathan answered, pointing to the side of broken marble stone. “Artifacts are often altered to escape museum identification. It’s like a quick paint job on a stolen car.” Jonathan inspected it even more closely. “Looks as though someone even tried to artificially age that section with chemicals. Proper archaeological testing—”