The Last Ember (32 page)

“
Cuniculus
means ‘tunnel’ or ‘subterranean passage,’” Jonathan translated. “The second word is the Latin genitive of the name Hezekiah.”

“Hezekiah’s tunnel,” Emili said. “And below that, Valadier wrote an additional line in a modern Italian:
“‘Sotto cannone chiesa,’”
she read aloud.

“‘Beneath a canonical church’?” Jonathan translated.

“Yes, and notice how Valadier used a different font and color. He was one of the first preservationists to distinguish his modern additions from the original. When he restored the Arch of Titus in the Forum, he intentionally used a travertine distinguishable from the ancient marble.”

“Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” Jonathan said. “What does it mean?”

“I think it’s telling us how Josephus moved a lamp made of eight feet of solid gold out of the Temple Mount.” Emili marveled. ”Through the tunnel dug by King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.”

W
ith a sense of urgency, Emili and Jonathan hurried back through the underground streetscape and climbed into the synagogue’s furnace room. By the time Jonathan put the grate back into place and followed Emili up the stairs, she was already sharing the discovery with Orvieti, showing him the flashlit photographs of the mural on the digital screen of her camera.

“Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” Orvieti said. “Of course, it would have to be.”

He walked to the bookshelves and reached up to pull a volume from a high shelf. Jonathan walked over to help, but Orvieti waved him off. “This is my exercise,” he said kindly.

He opened the volume and returned to the table.

“The Book of Chronicles,” Jonathan said.

“Are you familiar with the story of King Hezekiah?” Orvieti asked.

Jonathan shook his head, always somewhat guilty that his historical knowledge of the biblical era lagged behind his knowledge of pagan civilizations such as Rome and Greece.

“The year was about 700 B.C.,” Orvieti said as he flipped through the tissue-thin pages of the text. “King Hezekiah of ancient Israel decided to stop paying the king of Assyria
tangenti
.” He looked up to Emili for a translation.

“Protection money,” she said, smiling.

“Hezekiah knew the Assyrian forces wouldn’t waste any time laying siege to Jerusalem,” Orvieti continued. “Knowing the city would be surrounded, Hezekiah designed a water supply that ran beneath the Mount to the Gihon spring, located outside the city walls.”

“And the tunnel has been discovered?” Jonathan asked.

“Only the southernmost tip,” Emili replied. “In the nineteenth century, a boy bathing in an Arab village near the Gihon spring discovered the tunnel along with an eighth-century-B.C. plaque describing the tunnel’s construction, just as in the biblical text. But where the rest of the tunnel runs beneath the Mount is still a mystery.”

“But it probably wasn’t a mystery to Josephus,” Jonathan said. “That’s why he could escape from the Mount without the Romans’ hearing any digging. They used a tunnel that was already there.”

“Unfortunately, even if this theory is correct,” Orvieti said, “there’s no way to figure out where Hezekiah’s tunnel is.”

“Not unless Valadier told us,” Emili said. “There was another line written in modern Italian?
Sotto cannone chiesa
.”

“ ‘Beneath a canonical church’?” Orvieti asked.

“That must be referring to the modern location of the tunnel,” Jonathan said. “‘Beneath a canonical church’.”

Emili zoomed in the image on her camera’s digital screen. “The only problem is, at least twenty churches now span the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem. Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Franciscan, Armenian. All of them are considered part of one Christian canon or another.”

“Keep zooming,” Jonathan said, staring at the digital image from over her shoulder. “The word
cannone
has two
n
’s here. I don’t think that’s just an antiquated spelling. Like English,
canone
with one
n
means ‘tradition,’ but with two it’s a—”

“Gun,” Emili said.

Jonathan nodded, but then looked askance. “Wait, this inscription is telling us to look for a church with a big gun sitting on the top of it? That doesn’t make sense.”

“But it might have when this mural was drawn in 1825. The Ottoman hold on Jerusalem was precarious,” Emili said. “A cannon could have sat on a church and pointed over the city walls of Jerusalem as a defense.”

“We may have some maps of Jerusalem here,” Orvieti said, searching the far side of the archive.

But Emili was too deep in her own calculations to respond. She stared at the digital image of the fresco, a mischievous glint lighting her eyes from within.

“Whoa, whoa,” Jonathan said protractedly. “You’re not thinking of—”

“Of course I am.”

“Emili, we’re talking about a church in Jerusalem from nearly two hundred years ago?
Even
if you made it to Jerusalem, the church may not even exist anymore. You’re acting like you can just return to nineteenth-century Jerusalem by hopping on a plane.”

“As a matter of fact, I can,” Emili said. “In the Old City, there’s an elaborate model of Jerusalem built for the 1873 World’s Fair. It depicts every small structural detail of nineteenth-century Jerusalem in beaten zinc, down to the colored flags of the consulates. It’s exactly how a nineteenth-century pilgrim would have seen Jerusalem.”

She saw interest flash across Jonathan’s face.

“You don’t even have a way of getting there,” Jonathan protested. “The carabinieri have probably identified us from the metro surveillance cameras. You’d be stopped on the first commercial flight to Jerusalem tomorrow.”

“I’m not thinking of a commercial flight, Jon.” She stepped toward him. “There’s the World Food Programme based here in Piazza del Popolo. Cargo planes leave every week from Ciampino to Ben-Gurion, shipping food packages en route to Gaza.”

“And that’s tonight?”

“I’m scheduled to be on it anyway,” she said.

“Emili, at the very least, just wait a day to see if we can speak to someone at the—”

“Carabinieri?” she interrupted. “And tell them what? That we’ve discovered a series of embedded messages from a first-century historian whom every scholar in the world is dead wrong about? That he wasn’t a traitor at all, but really running Rome as a double agent so he could smuggle the tabernacle menorah to safety? And, by the way, just when his messages were about to be discovered by Napoleon’s megalomaniacal expeditions two hundred years ago, an eighteenth-century architect working for the pope quietly saved them by painting a copy of an ancient mural in the Jewish Ghetto?”

Jonathan exhaled, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Then I’m going with you,” he said, feeling his chest tighten. “I won’t let you go alone.”

“Just this morning, in the courtroom, you said you were here for a ‘legal case’—that’s it. And now because of a
theory,
you’ll go with me? To Jerusalem?”

“I’m no longer worried your theory is wrong. I’m worried it’s
right
. There’s no telling what these men are capable of. They
detonated
beneath the Colosseum.”

“And the firm?” she said tauntingly. “You said the firm
needs
you.”

“Right now,
you
need me,” Jonathan said. “And I don’t just mean because my Latin is better than yours. I mean because I can help you make sense of all this. I can keep you grounded, keep you . . .
safe
.”

Emili walked toward him, her solemnity and quickness suggesting that he had angered her or taken her for weak. She pushed his right shoulder, shoving him into the stacks and out of view.

“Okay,” Jonathan said. “So my Latin’s not
much
better than—”

But Emili did not let him finish. She opened her mouth and kissed him deeply, her hands clutching at the back of Jonathan’s hair.

“Wait,” she said, stepping back. “There’s a problem.”

“What problem?” Jonathan said. “That was the
opposite
of a problem.”

“You don’t have travel documents to fly aboard a UN aircraft. To even step on the tarmac you need a
laissez-passer
.”

Jonathan knew it was comparatively easy for those with the coveted light-blue UN passes to move across the most complicated borders in the world.

“They’re only issued to international civil servants, aren’t they?”

Emili thought a moment, a conspiratorial smile not far behind. “Well,” she said, “we’re about to change that.”

I
nside Vatican City, Profeta walked through the papal apartments’ back corridors, far from where tourists are permitted. A ceremonial papal guard in Elizabethan dress snapped to attention, unlocking a series of oak doors leading to the Sala Consultazione Manoscritti, the reading room for Vatican drafts and manuscripts. Profeta knew only an exclusive club of independent Christian scholars and Vatican researchers had ever seen the breathtaking size of the reading room for drafts and manuscripts. The walls of ancient books were impossibly long, as though two mirrors reflected panels of rococo vaults stretching into infinity. Across the ceiling, angels danced with books and keys as parchments rained down from heaven in remarkable trompe l’oeil stuccowork.

Nestled between two card catalogs, Cardinal Francesco Inocenti’s girth nearly filled the width of a small niche in which his desk sat. Profeta wondered how someone with such an affection for old-style Roman cooking had reached Inocenti’s old age. More than a half-century ago, the cardinal started his career in the Church as a librarian, and now, having retired from the College of Cardinals, where he had spent twenty years, he returned to his true passion, cataloging the world’s rarest cracked and faded books behind the Vatican’s walls, where his career had begun.

On his desk was a manuscript hundreds of years old, its metal locks blackened from fire.

“Jacopo, thank you for coming so quickly. You brought the manuscript page I requested?”

Profeta handed him the page inside a laminated sheath. With extra care, Cardinal Inocenti removed the page from its protective covering and lay it down inside the open medieval manuscript in front of him. The inside jagged edge of the manuscript page matched perfectly with the long ripped stub that protruded inches out of the binding.

“How did you know this page belonged to this book?” Profeta asked.

“For two hundred years, pages from many of our Josephus manuscripts have been missing,” Cardinal Inocenti said. “In 1809, Napoleon stormed Rome’s walls and brought the Vatican to its knees. He had all the Vatican treasures at his mercy, but what did he take? Not the Vatican’s most prized possessions, the statue of Augustus or the Laocoön. Instead, his archaeologists came to the library and examined the manuscripts of Flavius Josephus.”

“Flavius Josephus as an archaeological guide? But Emperor Titus commissioned Josephus to write his history as propaganda. They are as biased as one of Berlusconi’s newspapers writing on politics.”

The cardinal laughed, but his solemnity returned as he lifted the manuscript page. “It was certainly Titus’s intention for Josephus to write a flattering Roman history, but what if Josephus had something else in mind?

“The parchment was treated with potassium nitrate. They were looking for writing rubbed out under the vellum beneath the current script. Apparently, there may be more to Josephus than meets the eye.”

“Your Eminence, these efforts sound more appropriate for a scholar, not an antiquities thief. These men do not share your love of history.”

“I am not speaking about history,” Cardinal Inocenti said, his gaze anchored on Profeta. “I am speaking about greed,
Comandante
. Treating Josephus’s manuscripts with chemicals?” He pointed at the circled letters of text. “Searching for equidistant letter sequences in the Greek? What is the adage you once shared with me about stolen antiquities?”

“The greater the relic, the greater the thief,” Profeta said.

“Veramente,”
Cardinal Inocenti said.

He swiveled in his chair, reaching for a manila envelope behind him. “For years, our monasteries in Jerusalem have been tracking illicit archaeological activity beneath the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, the Waqf’s jurisdiction makes the inner workings of the Vatican look like an open book.”

He removed pictures from the manila envelope and handed them to Profeta. Each depicted large piles of rubble amid olive groves. Inside the huge piles of dirt, Profeta could make out crushed marble and terra-cotta.

“What is this?”

“Priceless ruins from beneath the Temple Mount,” Cardinal Inocenti said. “We found them dumped in the valley of Kidron. The piles were systematically mixed together to prevent future excavation.”

“And the Waqf is conducting these excavations?”

“Not directly, no. There are many honorable and religious imams within the Waqf Authority who know nothing of these excavations. But a small few within the Waqf have used the trust’s jurisdiction over the Mount to permit an ongoing excavation of catastrophic proportions, led by a man named only as Salah ad-Din.”

“Salah ad-Din as in the twelfth-century warrior?”

The cardinal nodded. “Our Christian informants in Jerusalem report that this man Salah ad-Din has been researching priceless Josephus manuscripts as well as detailed topographical maps of Rome.”

“And you think this relates to the excavations we’ve discovered in Rome?”

“Yes, our sources report that he was digging here to find a location beneath Jerusalem. Jacopo, he will use methods of excavation cruder than you can imagine.”

“Cruder than what I saw beneath the Colosseum? I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“Our contacts in Bethlehem report nitrocellulose explosives, as well as rubber suppression mats, smuggled in through Syria. Whatever he is looking for, he will detonate to find it.”