The Last Ember Page 28

  “Does this man look familiar to you?”

  “Yes,” Lieutenant Rufio said reluctantly. “That’s him, the one from the Colosseum.”

  “The image is from a security camera above the platform,” Profeta said. He stared at the subject of the photograph. Then Profeta turned his gaze out the window, toward the dome of the Pantheon, a block away. “He has escaped us three times now.”

  “Three times?” Rufio asked, hoping Profeta had not made the identification yet. “Even if he was the suspect in the Colosseum, that’s twice, Comandante. Once in the Colosseum and once there in the metro station. When was the third time?”

  “When I sat across from him at the law firm of Dulling and Pierce,” Profeta said. “Jonathan Marcus. An American lawyer who arrived in Rome last night at eleven-fifty p.m. and checked into the Hotel Exedra at four-fourteen a.m.”

  He placed the black-and-white photograph of Jonathan Marcus from the Dulling and Pierce website beside the surveillance shot.

  “An American lawyer was involved in the Colosseum explosion?” Rufio asked, acting surprised.

  “Not just any American lawyer,” Profeta said. “Seven years ago, he was a Rome Prize winner here at the American Academy, conducting research on Flavius Josephus. It’s all right here,” Profeta said, handing Lieutenant Rufio a red file. Rufio knew the color codings of the files. Red indicated a prior arrest.

  “He has a police record?” Rufio raised his eyebrows, his surprise now genuine. He opened the file and lifted a clipped Italian newspaper article. He read the headline aloud: “ ‘ Late-Night Excavation Takes Tragic Turn.’ ” Rufio flipped through the file’s pages and looked up at the comandante.

  “For trespassing?” Rufio asked, his eyes still in the file.

  “He was lucky to escape without a charge of omicidio,” Profeta said.

  “Homicide?”

  “It seems we’ve underestimated Mr. Marcus’s knowledge of the ancient world,” Profeta responded. “He brought three other graduate students to the outskirts of Rome, seeking a tomb of some kind. They climbed a fence onto the grounds of an abandoned eighteenth-century villa called the Villa Torlonia and roped into an ancient catacomb.”

  “According to the carabinieri investigators, they rappelled into the ruin at twelve-thirty a.m.,” Rufio read from the file. “The ruins collapsed shortly after one a.m.”

  “Killing one of the graduate students,” Profeta added factually. “A Roman native, Gianpaolo Narcusi, was pronounced dead on arrival at Rome’s San Pietro Fatebenfratelli at one forty-one a.m.,” Profeta continued from memory. “But more important for our purposes were the other two graduate students present that evening.”

  Lieutenant Rufio read aloud the first name, typed on the police report in courier print.

  “Emili Travia, sir,” Rufio said. “That’s the UN official from the Colosseum.”

  Profeta nodded. “And the fourth graduate student?”

  “I don’t believe this,” muttered Rufio. “ ‘ Member of the International Center and former fellow of the Palazzo Conservatori’ . . .” Rufio looked up. “It was Sharif Lebag.”

  “But even more relevant to our investigation is not who joined him last night, but where they excavated.”

  Profeta handed Rufio another photograph of a crude excavation. A chain saw lay beside a sawed-open column.

  “It’s a photograph recovered from Professor Cianari’s office earlier today. We suspect Cianari realized the importance of his discovery, and documented its location across the catacomb wall in spray paint.”

  “It’s too dark to read.”

  “The quality is poor,” Profeta agreed, handling another version to Rufio. “Copia’s team managed to digitally lighten it.”

  In the zoomed image, the scrawled words became instantly legible.

  “Villa Torlonia,” Rufio said.

  “That’s right, Lieutenant, the column we discovered in the warehouse was found—”

  “Precisely where Jonathan Marcus was illegally excavating seven years ago,” Rufio completed.

  “I don’t know what research Mr. Marcus began seven years ago, but it looks like someone is trying to finish it.”

  Rufio stood up to leave.

  “One more thing, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, Comandante?”

  “I’d like you to head up the manhunt for the suspect. Use whatever force is necessary to bring him here for questioning.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rufio said honorifically. “Whatever force is necessary.”

  59

  Eilat Segev led Emili and Jonathan into the ancient citadel’s museum courtyard, still floodlit from the night before. They climbed a flight of outdoor metal stairs to the parapets of the Old City’s wall. A gauzy morning mist settled along the bottom of an adjoining valley and the sun was still low over the Judean Hills’ haze in the distance.

  For Segev, the view was different. She remembered battling the Jordanians for control of this ancient citadel in 1967, before it was repurposed as a museum. On these high ancient walls, Jordanian snipers lay in wait between the parapets like medieval archers, hurling back Israeli battalions as they scaled the citadel at night. To this day, Segev watched families and their children on these ramparts. She watched them linger at picture points on the afternoon museum tours, secretly remembering all the men who gave their lives for that view.

  Segev punched a code into a keypad in the stone and the lattice gate slid open silently. They entered a large hall, where models of ancient Jerusalem lined the corridors. The Solomonic period, tenth to the sixth century B.C.; the Second Temple period, sixth century B.C. to the first century A.D. Display cases contained silver coins from Hadrian’s reign of Jerusalem; an ancient sword excavated from ruins near the Temple Mount. Along another wall of the foyer, stood a brass replica of Verrocchio’s David, a gift by the city of Florence on the occasion of the Israeli recapture of the Old City from the Jordanians.

  “Did you tell Comandante Profeta of our conversation?” Emili said.

  “Of course not. I couldn’t expect him to understand. I am not sure anyone in Europe, or the UN for that matter, understands the situation beneath the Temple Mount,” Segev said. “Our infrared film taken from a helicopter above the Mount indicates there are bulldozers and dump trucks inside the Mount, raking the walls as we speak.”

  “But Israel is a UNESCO-compliant nation,” Jonathan said. “Isn’t there something that—”

  “No.” Segev slowly shook her head. “The Waqf Authority has claimed continuous jurisdiction over the Temple Mount for nearly eight hundred years. Well, the last eight hundred years, except for a couple of hours.”

  “A couple of hours?” Jonathan said.

  “In 1967, we repelled an invasion by Jordan and captured East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, unifying Jerusalem for the first time in two thousand years. You can still see the bullet holes in the Zion Gate where we shot our way into the Old City. I remember the ranking colonel’s voice crackling through the army wireless. ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands! The Temple Mount is in our hands!’ But within days, the military ceded sovereignty of the Mount back to the Waqf.”

  “Why return control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf ?”

  “Some historians say the Israeli politicians at the time were wary of the Mount’s religious poignancy. They wanted to prevent ideas of messianic redemption from disrupting the building of a practical, modern society in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

  “So they let the Mount stay in the hands of the Waqf?” Jonathan said.

  “Well, technically, the administration of the Mount was to return to the Jordanian king, who controlled the Mount nominally under Jordanian occupation before 1967. At that time the king delegated to the Waqf only the most ministerial tasks of its daily administration. But after the Oslo Peace Accords, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, under Yasser Arafat, tried to reinvent itself as more than a terrorist organization. In order to imitate an actual governm
ent and demonstrate some organizational capacity, Arafat encouraged some members within the Waqf to wrest control from the Jordanians. Even the Jordanians do not know the level of archaeological activity beneath the Mount for the last fifteen years. The Waqf has descended into a secrecy not known since Ottoman times. To this day, the Temple Mount remains an island of the Waqf’s sovereignty, its funding routed through clandestine Saudi cultural groups and obscure corporate funds.”

  “The grand mufti’s legacy continues.” Emili shook her head. “And to think they are close to finding—”

  “Emili,” Segev said, “the Israel Antiquities Authority has spent years researching possible locations for artifacts from the Roman sack of Jerusalem. I just listened to your entire theory on the phone. There is no hard evidence that Flavius Josephus or any other historical figure managed to escape with the menorah of the Temple. After exhaustive research in France, the Israel Antiquities Authority decided to stop excavating for the relic.”

  “Why France?” Jonathan said.

  “Carcassonne, to be exact. I was still in intelligence on foreign security at the time,” Segev said. “In 1979, an Israeli secret service security detail was dispatched to Carcassonne, where myths had circulated for centuries that the menorah was buried. I suppose the premise is laughable, but from my own graduate work at Hebrew University I thought the location made sense. The Goths sacked Rome in A.D. 410, forty-five years before the more famous sack by Carthage. So it would have been the Goths who took the menorah, in which case the menorah would have followed the Goths to southern France—Carcassonne, to be exact. Golda Meir approved the project, but only if the operation could be done quietly enough, without Israeli taxpayers knowing the Mossad was chasing after legends.” She shrugged. “Of course, their two weeks of investigations turned up nothing but local madmen and cheap relic shops playing up the mystery of buried treasure. The only remaining possible location, of course, is beneath the Temple Mount itself.” Segev shook her head, crestfallen. “Which in this political climate makes it—”

  “All the more important for us,” Emili interrupted, “to find which convent in Jerusalem was described as the ‘canonical convent’ on the mural of the Roman synagogue. We need to see the model.”

  Emili and Jonathan followed Segev down a spiral stairwell into a storage area. Lights flicked on one after another, illuminating a damp vaulted cellar. In the middle of the room, a sprawling metallic model of a city spread thirty feet in each direction.

  “The detail is remarkable,” Jonathan said.

  “It weighs more than a ton.” Segev pointed at the model. “You should be able to find the convent here.”

  Find the convent? Jonathan leaned over. You could find a nineteenth-century piece of litter on this thing. Along the perimeter of the model, the outer Ottoman walls made a rectangle on the ridge along the Valley of Kidron. Inside the city walls, the model portrayed every street and alleyway, even the flags on the various monasteries as well as small crescents that stood on top of one of the Ottoman fortresses. Perched atop a high plateau overlooking the alleyways, the ruins of the Temple Mount were in a relative state of abandonment. The model portrayed the crumbling wooden dome of the Dome of the Rock as it was in 1873.

  “These retaining walls built during the Roman era still support the Temple Mount platform,” Segev said. With a red laser pointer, she indicated the Temple Mount area. “Each is roughly seventy feet of Herodian stone in height. Although it is a secret where this man Salah ad-Din bases his operations, we know the Waqf has renovated subterranean vaults in the cisterns along the northwest corner of the Mount here.” Her laser pointer now moved along the northern wall of the Mount. “We believe the dump trucks come in through here, Bab el-Asbat, known as the Lion’s Gate, which is not in view of any of the churches or synagogues of the Old City. When the trucks exit, they dump the archaeological finds in the Valley of Kidron, here”—her laser pointer circled an area in a valley hundreds of feet beneath the Old City’s outer walls—“among this grove of olive trees.” A copse of olive trees with their gnarled trunks was represented in the model with exquisite detail.

  “They have hollowed out so much of the Temple Mount that this wall, here”—Emili pointed at a section of the southern wall of the model—“is in danger of collapse. For years, UNESCO teams have been working on stabilizing the wall from the outside. That is what first brought Sharif here as a visiting staff member.”

  Jonathan wandered around to the other side of the model.

  “Emili!”

  “What?”

  “There is a cannon on top of this steeple.” He pointed at a miniature stone convent half a foot along the model’s scale from the Temple Mount. There was a shiny silver cannon above the domed convent roof.

  “The Sisters of Zion Convent,” Segev said. She could see Emili’s plan beginning to materialize.

  “Don’t even think about it, please,” Segev said maternally. “We cannot protect you inside the Mount. You are crossing into a place beyond our law. I will not even be able to say I have assisted you in getting inside.”

  60

  Salah ad-Din moved through the tunnel as though blasting through the rock with each step.

  “From this point,” Salah ad-Din said, exhilarated, “the tunnel should have been sealed since the first century.”

  Unfortunately, Ramat thought, it almost certainly has been. He knew the earthquake of A.D. 363 closed off most of the passageways beneath the Mount, protecting many of its vaults from mystics, medieval souvenir hunters, and even the famed Templars. Ramat’s guilt swelled. Because of me, the first man walking through this aqueduct since the Roman era is no better than Titus.

  The tunnel was chipped from bedrock, not limestone, so there was little detritus. Salah ad-Din’s men were running ribbed yellow hoses along the center of the tunnel to remove the dust.

  The tunnel’s ceiling grew higher, and with his flashlight Salah ad-Din illuminated Roman-era carvings of intricate biblical imagery and fan tastical animals: a lion with wings and the talons of an eagle, a snake that walked like a man. As they passed, one of the men behind Salah ad-Din sprayed large red X’s on each carving, identifying them to be destroyed.

  Salah ad-Din led the team farther into the corridor. He rounded a corner and stopped. Dark and shaggy moss, thick as an ancient beard, coated a wall in front of him. He traced his flashlight’s beam along the top of the ceiling, exposing a brightly patinaed metallic trim.

  Salah ad-Din stepped carefully toward the moss, studying the ground’s stones as he walked. Moving his arm slowly, he pulled a long knife from his waist and reached into the moss, his arm disappearing nearly to his shoulder. He reached something solid and tapped it with the point of the blade. It tinged with the sound of metal against metal.

  “The hidden gate was a bronze gate, according to Josephus,” Salah ad-Din rasped, out of breath. “This must be it.”

  “That door is three meters high,” Ramat whispered, standing behind Salah ad-Din in awe. “It will take days to unhinge.”

  Salah ad-Din ignored him, taking in the size of the ancient structure with a clinical gaze.

  “Evacuate all men from inside the Mount,” he said. “Removing this door will require our largest blast.” He turned to Ahmed. “Place the spices under the ticket counter in the Western Wall plaza by eight a.m.” His eyes returned to the ancient bronze door. “The distraction must be simultaneous.”

  61

  In East Jerusalem, Jonathan and Emili followed Segev through the Arab souk toward the Sisters of Zion Convent. Even at seven in the morning, the Old City market had an animal breath all its own. In its labyrinth of stone alleyways, an open-air butcher assaulted the carcasses of sheep and goats for the morning market. The butcher cautioned them to watch their step, pointing to stones slick with animal viscera. The only sound was his transistor radio, softly playing Iranian pop music.

  Deeper into the souk, among the shuttered stalls nestled beneath intricately car
ved stone balconies, some booths already had a carnival atmosphere, where old men argued furiously over the day’s first fruit deliveries stacked between the stone ramparts. Kaffiyehs and tabus, long dresses for men, dangled from the ceiling, and Jonathan and Emili pushed through them as through vines of a thick, disorienting jungle. Under a bare light-bulb, one shopkeeper took inventory of his goods before the morning market. Jonathan noticed him stacking framed pictures of Yasser Arafat, alongside T-shirts emblazoned with “My Bubby Loves the Kotel.”

  “Now, that vendor is diversified,” Jonathan commented.

  “Commerce doesn’t have the luxury of intolerance,” Emili said. She knew that some of the most successful illegal relic trading in the world was between Sunnis and Shiites who overlooked their religious differences to smuggle antiquities out of Iraq.

  “Here it is,” Jonathan said when they reached the façade of the Sisters of Zion Convent.

  They knocked on the heavy oak door.

  Silence, then the unlocking of a bolt. The door was opened cautiously.

  Through the opening, a tall, thin woman appeared. From her mid-length blue dress, gray sweater, and flat white shoes, Emili knew she was a member of the Sisterhood of Zion, a Roman Catholic sect dating to the mid-nineteenth century. She appeared to be in her late forties, despite the youthful auburn hair that ran down her back.

  “May we speak with the abbess?” Emili said in English. “I am afraid the matter is urgent.”

  “The abbess is unavailable at the moment,” the woman replied in an Australian accent.

  “But the matter is quite—”

  “I am sorry. The convent is only open to visitors from the hours of—”

  “We have information about an illegal excavation near your convent’s basement,” Emili said.