The Last Ember (35 page)

Jonathan woke with a start. It was night outside the plane. The plane’s engines rumbled like distant thunder, and the wings’ fog lights flickered in the darkness. The red emergency lever of a steel door had burrowed into the small of his back. In his exhaustion, Jonathan wiped his eyes, but not with the fogginess that usually attends waking in a foreign place. His ears felt a sudden drop in cabin pressure. The plane was descending.

Jonathan jolted back in his seat, realizing Emili’s seat was empty.

Suddenly, the cockpit’s door opened, and there she was, apparently having just conferred with the pilots. Cheeks flushed and her blond hair falling lightly over both shoulders, she somehow looked refreshed. In the cabin lighting, her full lips had a shine and Jonathan remembered once calling them—amid admiring laughter—the pink hulls of an ancient Roman ship, a trireme, their voluptuous folds like the hundred oars that slanted from each side.

“Landing in less than ten minutes,” she said, plopping back in her seat, completely unconscious of her beauty. “Just before dawn.”

“No meal on this flight, then?” Jonathan pointed at the cartons of food relief packages. “I can make a mean omelet with a metric ton of powdered eggs.”

The pilot was speaking loudly into a walkie-talkie. Landing procedures were now transferring control of the aircraft from Cairo air-traffic control to the Israeli Southern Command control tower.

“We’re approaching Tel Aviv,” she said. Jonathan could see the row of lit beachfront hotels as the plane banked sharply east, and within minutes the illuminated glass walls of the airport came into view, a strange modern architectural oasis in the dark desert landscape. A recent $100 million renovation had transformed Ben-Gurion into a sprawling, multilayered glass-and-chrome structure supported on a base of Jerusalem stone.

As the UN plane approached the runway, the cabin was half as pressurized and the descent twice as steep as a commercial airline. Jonathan was still catching his breath when the plane slowed to a stop and the pilots were busy filling out paperwork.

There was a light blue tinge on the horizon. The pilot opened the door, and they were greeted by a strong whiff of jet fuel and three Israeli soldiers who clanked up aluminum stairs to secure the inside of the UN aircraft, which was standard procedure for all World Food Programme cargo arrivals at Ben-Gurion.

Emili and Jonathan climbed into the backseat of a small tram on the tarmac as carts whizzed past to unload the UN foodstuffs.

The tram drove Jonathan and Emili beneath the belly of a plane with African insignias that was parked on the runway. A dozen people in tattered clothing were exiting down a staircase to the tarmac.

“What other plane arrives at”—Jonathan looked at his watch—“five a.m.?”

“New Ethiopian émigrés,” said the driver of the tram, pointing at an old African man in a knit white skullcap, barely able to descend the stairs of the plane. Jonathan remembered, from his international law textbook, Israel’s complex history of requesting that the Ethiopian government permit the return of the millennia-old Jewish community in Africa, widely viewed as the lost tribe of Dan. Jonathan watched as the man reached the base of the aluminum stairs, two young Israeli soldiers holding on to his frail arms. The old man knelt down and kissed the tarmac. Emili saw it, too.

Terra Sancta,
Jonathan thought.

“Welcome to the Promised Land,” she said.

The marble expanse of Ben-Gurion’s central terminal stretched before them, multiple stories of a crescent-shaped atrium ringed by the Hebrew script of American brand names in neon. A large English sign, KOSHER, hung above a McDonald’s in the food court.

A bank of fifteen passport-control booths came into view.

“Passport, please?”

Jonathan slid Raoul’s handiwork beneath the plated window of the UN customs booth and his heart might as well have pounded against the glass. A pretty Israeli official offered a warm smile and removed a pen from her ringlets of brown hair to write a brief note. Jonathan offered a tight smile, but his lips were becoming pale from being pressed too hard together.
A day ago, I was practicing law, and now I am traveling on a forged passport.

Jonathan envisioned plainclothes Israeli security guards appearing out of nowhere hauling him into a backroom at Ben-Gurion, and giving him a military escort back to Rome. But uneventfully, the young woman just handed the altered passport back to him.
“Todah,”
she said with a polite nod. Her eyes turned to the next person in line. Despite his best efforts, Jonathan appeared visibly surprised as she waved him through.

They stepped through the airport’s glass doors, and Jonathan’s tie blew over his shoulder in the dry Levantine wind. The sun was rising over the coastal plains, illuminating a line of Kia taxis outside the baggage terminal.

“Emili!” yelled a voice from behind them, and both of them spun. A slender young Arab man with dark good looks and aviator sunglasses stuck his head out the window. He waved frantically from an old dusty Mercedes limousine, its flaking beige paint blackened from its own diesel fumes. Ratty curtains hung inside the windows. It was the kind of car the dictator of a third-world country might have had twenty years before.

He hopped out and gave Emili a hug. They exchanged a few words in Arabic.

“Jonathan, this is Yusef Rashid. He’s been with us at UNESCO for five years. Yusef, Jon Marcus is an old friend.”

Old friend,
Jonathan thought.
A promotion.

Yusef took off his glasses and his youth—his fresh face, his wide, light brown eyes—became much more apparent. Jonathan noticed the car’s hood had the letters “TV” in black masking tape on its hood. The paint was sharper where the tape had previously spelled “UN.”

“You’ve switched to the press?” Jonathan said.

“No.” Yusef smiled. “I had ‘UN’ there to prevent being shot at. But that stopped working.” He held up a slender finger as though discerning a secret far beyond his years, “Then I realized no one around here likes bad publicity.”

B
lindfolded, Ramat Mansour felt the tight grip of two of Salah ad-Din’s men, one lifting each elbow as they rushed him.

He stumbled along the corridor’s uneven ground until the floor beneath his shoes felt smooth, metallic. One of the guards pushed a button, and the sound of an electric ping accompanied the sensation of a descent.
An elevator.

When the elevator doors opened, the men removed his blindfold. Ramat found himself standing in a large subterranean hallway. He marveled at the massive stones lining the underground corridor, trying to match up his surroundings to the hypothetical sketches of what archaeologists suggested lay beneath the Temple Mount. The hallway was empty, except for a few clerics sitting on small wooden chairs with rifles across their chests, a testament to the secret nature of this world. Salah ad-Din demanded loyalty from all those inside the Mount. Ramat knew all too well of local fatwas issued against families of even suspected traitors.

One of the clerics watched Ramat as he passed.

“Hope he keeps you longer than the last one,” the cleric cracked.

At the end of the corridor, a large guard with a semiautomatic slung across his ample stomach patted down Ramat’s chest and legs.

“I don’t own a gun,” Ramat said to the guard as he frisked him.

“Not for guns,” the guard said. “For cameras.”

Ramat was reminded that any documentation of their excavation proved a threat far greater than any weapon.

The guard’s search for recording equipment renewed Ramat’s sense of guilt, reminding him of the work he had done a year before, when he assisted the beginning stages of “this excavation.” Back then, only ten feet of the cavern had been cleared, and in many places the men had to duck to swing their picks, so as not to hit the ceiling.

The guard bent his knees, using his strength to lift up the bolt lock of the iron door behind him. At first Ramat became disoriented, certain that he had been marched back outside. Only when he saw the cavern’s ceiling distantly above him did he realize the scale of work that Salah ad-Din had managed to complete. The guards pushed him forward.

Give him the information and get back to your family,
Ramat thought, panicked that he had even witnessed the scale of the operation. He navigated through the heavy construction equipment, stepping over drills and walking around a bulldozer to reach a wooden sawhorse table, where Salah ad-Din stood hunched over an architectural map.

“Up there.” Salah ad-Din pointed toward a tunnel opening forty feet up the cavern wall. “That is where the tunnel came from beneath the Foundation Stone, but where does the aqueduct continue?” He drew an imaginary line across the air of the cavern. “Our technological equipment projected that the aqueduct would continue there.” Salah ad-Din pointed at an enormous gash in the far wall, indicating very recent destruction by bulldozer. “But those calculations were apparently
imprecise
,” Salah ad-Din said. The solid rock wall was evidence enough of his predicament.

Ramat walked a few feet, his head tilted down at the cavern floor. He knelt and felt a slight curvature separated by two lips of carved stone a foot apart.
A sluice.
“The ground is uneven here, and there are remains of a water drain, although”—
although the tire tracks of your machinery nearly obliterated it
—“they’ve suffered some damage,” Ramat said, containing himself. He crossed the cavern, following the remains of the drain. “And notice the discoloration of these few feet of rock.” He pointed at a vein of darker rock running across the floor of the cavern.

Salah ad-Din looked back up at the high opening to the tunnel. “The water cascaded from the tunnel and flowed along the bottom of this cavern.”

“Yes, and that explains the slope of the floor toward the opposite wall,” Ramat said.

“But there are no records of a Roman tunnel there,” Salah ad-Din said, pointing to the foot of the far stone wall.

“The Roman-era priests must have used a drainage system from the First Temple, from the Assyrian age of the eighth century B.C.,” Ramat said. “If there is a tunnel behind there, it was dug by the biblical king Hezekiah.”

 

 

 

 

Salah ad-Din gestured for the men to drill through the cavern wall, giving out instructions with the efficiency of a military commander. But in his cousin’s eyes Ramat could see an anxiety.
He is running out of time.
Sixty years of the grand mufti’s research had brought Salah ad-Din to this moment, but Ramat knew his cousin had made the obsession his own.

Two men lifted a jackhammer to position it diagonally a few inches above the floor. After a few deafening staccato blasts, the drill bit quieted, finding the air of the tunnel behind the wall.

“Enough!” Salah ad-Din shouted, and the gurgling noise of the drill’s motor silenced. Salah ad-Din walked over to the wall and knelt at its base. A thin stream of water trickled out of the wall.

“This is the aqueduct leading to the hidden gate,” Salah ad-Din said. He turned to Ramat. “Cousin, you have found it.”

L
eaving Ben-Gurion Airport at dawn, Jonathan watched the winter rains assemble over the Judean Hills, their gray cumulus clouds un derlit beneath by the rising sun like great bales of wool set aflame. Through the car’s open windows, Jonathan could taste the aridity of the desert air and smell the cypresses. But within minutes, they began a steep ascent and the climate changed from the low coastal lands of Tel Aviv to the higher elevation of Jerusalem. From the airport, Yusef took Route One, two lanes of new asphalt that ribboned through the windswept expanse of the Judean wilderness. He did not bother to slow the Mercedes around the mountain road’s turns, sending Jonathan and Emili gently into each other, left and then right, as they exchanged nervous glances. Jonathan caught sight of a restored Roman marker carved in stone on the roadside.
Colonia Aelia Capitolina XXIV.
Aelia Capitolina, the Romans’ pagan name for Jerusalem after its conquest. The ancient marker indicated they were roughly twenty-four miles from the Old City walls.

The sunrise lit Emili’s pale brow, and, watching her, Jonathan knew there was something not only life-threatening about his having been hurled backward as through a portal—to Rome, to the academy, to her—there was something life-sustaining, too. A sense of self restored to him, unburied. He remembered what Emili had said in the courtroom not even one day before: “
I can see you buried under that suit, Jon. Like ruins.”

The Mercedes glided through a narrow canyon corridor, missing each rock face by inches. It looked as though these rock walls had been blasted through, but the slit in this mountain was natural, having been described in Josephus as “the mountain gate.” As the only direct route to Jerusalem from the coastal lands, these walls were one of the most famous military bottlenecks in history, assisting to defend Jerusalem by slowing down the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C., the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C., the Greeks in the second century B.C., the Romans in the first century A.D., and the Crusaders in the eleventh century A.D., the Ottomans in the sixteenth, and the Jordanians in the twentieth. Each force had looked to attack Jerusalem, and burned-out skeletons of Israeli tanks and vans still remained as memorials to the Israeli soldiers killed by Jordanian snipers who lined these mountain walls in 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence.

“Can the Israel Antiquities Authority secure us safe passage beneath the Temple Mount?” Jonathan said.

Emili shook her head. “The best they can do is give us copies of the maps that Charles Warren and other British explorers used.”

“Emili, those men came to Jerusalem in 1872,” Jonathan said.

“They were the last to survey beneath the Temple Mount.” Emili shrugged.