The Last Ember (40 page)

The next room was round and not large, twenty feet in diameter with a vaulted ceiling. The explosion shattered the room’s pilasters, but even the rubble indicated how ornate the walls had been.

“This was an underground sanctuary,” Emili said. “Judging from the designs, it was dug during the First Temple period in the eighth century B.C.”

“And seven hundred years later, during the Second Temple, the priests probably used it as a hidden vault.”

In the center of the room, three high steps were carved into a solid block of Jerusalem stone, leading to a flat, empty platform that gave Jonathan the impression that a large object once stood on it.

Three steps,
Jonathan thought, remembering what Chandler said.
The high priest ascended three steps to reach the menorah’s lamps.

“They hid the menorah here during the siege,” Jonathan said awestruck. He pointed at the ceiling darkened from smoke. “And tended its flame here.”

Jonathan trained his flashlight on the top step as he walked toward it. “There’s an inscription.”

“From captive to mouth of Rome,” he translated, “and it’s followed by a name in Hebrew
Yoseph
, which, since the recent addition of the letter
j
to the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century, is—”

“Joseph,” Emili said, “as in Josephus.”

Jonathan nodded. “His name was still Joseph at the time of the Temple’s destruction. He changed it to Josephus only after he received Roman citizenship, after the war.”

“But Joseph wasn’t a rare name in Jerusalem in the first century,” Emili said.

“How do we know this was the person who became Josephus?”

“Because Josephus has all but written his autobiography in these five words. ‘From captive to the mouth of Rome.’ One moment Josephus is captured and imprisoned, and the next he’s the top negotiator for the Roman Empire.”

“He
negotiated
for Rome?”

“His autobiography described his attempts to represent Titus in making a treaty with Jerusalem. The military leaders in Jerusalem agreed to send a diplomat equal in stature to Josephus. When Josephus waited outside the gates of Jerusalem to receive him,” Jonathan paused, “they released a pig.”

Emili smiled. “I’m guessing those negotiations didn’t go very well.”

“Nor did Josephus expect them to—at least secretly. But his public face to the world was as Rome’s negotiator. Literally, ‘the mouthpiece of Rome.’ ”

“But let me guess, knowing you, there’s another meaning here.”

“That predictable, huh?” Jonathan grinned. “It’s true, I don’t think Josephus is giving us his résumé just to identify himself. He could have done that in other ways. I think he’s identifying a location, telling us where he smuggled the menorah next.”

Emili stared at the phrase and suddenly lit up. “Ostia,” she said. “It’s a geographical marker. Not
ostium
as in the word ‘mouth.’ This is a reference to Ostia, the ancient harbor of Rome! The port was called Ostia, named for its location where the mouth of Rome’s Tiber River flowed into the Mediterranean Sea.”

“And ‘
captivoe
’ doesn’t refer to Josephus only as captive but to the relic. To the menorah,” Jonathan said. “The menorah was surrounded, a captive, until someone smuggled it not just out of the Mount, but out of Jerusalem entirely.”

“To the port of Rome,” Emili said, her eyes widening at the sheer scope of the ancient operation.

“Josephus knew that only a priest could tend the flame in exile,” Jonathan said, just as stunned by their discovery. “He had to bring it with him.”

A
long the Via Nomentana, Profeta stood in view of the skeleton of the Villa Torlonia. The carabinieri cars behind him idled in front of the high gates of what seemed an abandoned, overgrown park. The dark mansion was faintly visible in the morning fog. Rufio stood beside him, staring into the grounds. Weeds had overtaken the formal gardens that surrounded the abandoned, ramshackle villa.

“According to the police report,” Lieutenant Brandisi said, “Jonathan Marcus was excavating over there seven years ago.” He pointed near the villa.

“Looks haunted,” Rufio said.

“It is,” Profeta said. “By political ghosts, at the very least. Mussolini commandeered the villa as his private residence, and during the German occupation, the SS officers took up residence there in 1943.”

“Not exactly owners to brag about,” Brandisi said.

“It explains why the city let the villa fall into disrepair. Rome is still selective about what parts of its past it chooses to preserve.”

“Where are the tombs,
Comandante
?”

“All around us. Eight miles of catacombs are buried under here.”

“Eight miles?”
Brandisi said.

“The areas outside ancient Rome were giant cities of the dead,” Profeta said. “Eventually, palazzos and embassies were built over them.”

A security guard opened the villa’s gate.

“
Comandante,
maybe we’re wasting time,” Rufio said. “Why are we here?”

Brandisi’s walkie-talkie came to life. “An officer just located some excavation at the foot of the villa,” he told Profeta.

They approached the excavation, walking through abandoned gardens that resembled the dark wood of a fairy tale. Black moss covered the villa’s pathway. A white tomb no higher than an altar protruded from the ground. One of the tomb’s marble walls was missing.

“Look at this,” Brandisi said, shining his flashlight to the right. A two-foot trench had been dug alongside the tomb, where a heavily rusted pipe had been extracted from the earth, revealing a broken pipe joint.

“It could have been a utility crew fixing a gas leak,” Rufio suggested.

“Not a utility crew, Lieutenant.” Profeta knelt in the grass. “Someone applied an acidic compound to the tombstone to make it illegible.”

Profeta shone his flashlight into the tomb. He immediately recognized the inside chamber from the photographs taken by Professor Cianari. Missing from the center of the chamber was the column containing the woman they had found in the warehouse the night before. The top half of the column lay in the cavern, cut into small pieces.

“So this is where they found her,” Profeta said, his voice echoing in the chamber.

“Her?”

“The woman we discovered in the warehouse,” Profeta said. He pointed to a faint marble inscription that had been partially rubbed out: “
Sepulcrus Berenice Regina
.” Princess Berenice’s Tomb.

“Her name explains the extravagant burial. She was Berenice, the last princess of Jerusalem.”

As Profeta stepped back from the tomb, he saw a piece of evidence he did not expect to find. Lying in the wet grass was a small unbleached piece of paper, doused from days of rain.

Cigarette rolling paper.

Without Lieutenant Rufio’s noticing, Profeta put it in his pocket.

E
mili heard the sound of feet scraping down the corridor. “That guard isn’t far behind.”

Above the shouting, the sound of bullets now clamored against the rock walls.

“Let’s go,” Jonathan said.

But even as they ran, Emili could not help marveling how this tunnel confirmed the biblical story of Hezekiah’s mysterious water source during the Assyrian siege.
It will only be a matter of time before Salah ad-Din destroys this, too,
she thought.

“Can you hear that?” Jonathan asked, close behind her.

“I know, the guards are getting closer,” Emili said.

“I mean the water,” Jonathan said. They both stopped. The sound of an underground stream was unmistakable. “We must be close to a water source.” He shone his flashlight in front of them.

The corridor extended for another few inches. Emili had been so close to the edge that one of her shoes stuck out into the blackness.

Beyond the edge of the tunnel, Jonathan’s flashlight revealed a strange forest of white vines descending from above.

“They’re the roots of the olive trees in the valley above,” Emili said. “Some of those trees are over a thousand years old.”

The bouncing beams of the guards’ flashlights were now visible behind them.

“These roots must have followed the water level of the stream as it lowered over the centuries,” he said. “We can use them to rappel down to the stream, using the rock wall.”

“
Rappel down?
” Emili said. “Those roots will never hold us.”

A gun shot whizzed past them.

“Okay, you first,” Emili said.

Jonathan reached for the olive tree’s roots, but they were too far from the tunnel’s edge. He jumped and clutched a lacy tangle of roots as he swung between the walls of the shaft. The roots were surprisingly dry and brittle, and he could feel the strain of his weight on them. But they were strong enough to hold. He slid down the roots a half-foot and found a crook in the rock wall to rest the weight of his legs.

“Now you!” he called to Emili. “Jump above me!”

Emili threw herself toward the roots. With both hands she grabbed the same shoot Jonathan had, and rested her feet on Jonathan’s shoulders.

“Don’t move,” Jonathan whispered. “They’re right above us.”

They could hear the rushing water below; above them the guards’ flashlights were only a few feet away. The guards were now yelling, blaming each other for choosing the wrong tunnel.

Jonathan and Emili remained still, hanging in the darkness. The only sound was the crackling of the olive tree’s roots, withstanding the strain of both their weights—for the moment.

“It’s not holding.” Emili’s frightened whisper was barely audible. Some of the roots snapped, lowering them a few unnerving inches before they stopped. The Waqf guards stood at the edge of the precipice, their beams searching the darkness, but not below the tunnel’s edge where Jonathan and Emili swung from the roots.

Jonathan could hear the roots beginning to crack. He looked up. They were now hanging from a single, unraveling shoot.

One of the guards must have heard the sound because he shone his flashlight over the edge and exposed them hanging there. But there was no time for the guard to react.

The root snapped, the sound as sharp as a breaking stick. And like deadweight, their bodies fell, twisting, into the chasm.

W
ithin seconds of the blast in the Western Wall plaza, a black armored Volkswagen with tinted windows and Palestinian plates slowed to a stop in front of the Damascus Gate. A young bearded mullah jumped out and opened the Mercedes’ polyethylene-reinforced steel door. Salah ad-Din ducked into the backseat, which was outfitted with a customized ViaSat satellite terminal for streaming data and a satellite phone the size of an early-model, large cellular. Salah ad-Din turned his attention to the screen, where he received a live streaming feed from a video camera inside the tunnel’s blast site.

The Israeli police was already setting up parameters around the Old City—standard procedure after a terrorist bombing—and Salah ad-Din’s immediate departure was a necessary precaution.

Ostia,
Salah ad-Din thought.

The car traveled toward the Gaza border, and Salah ad-Din held a mobile phone in one hand and his grandfather’s lifetime of notes in a tattered leather book in the other. If the grand mufti only knew the critical information his grandson had just discovered, his wonderment would be rivaled only by the technology that streamed information to the computer screen in front of him.

“Keep searching for other inscriptions,” Salah ad-Din said. “We must be sure it is in Ostia.”

On the screen Salah ad-Din could make out the craggy limestone walls of the vault lit by the purple floodlight. The hidden gate came into view, blown diagonally across the corridor’s walls.

“We are still in the circular room, Sheikh,” said a voice behind the camera. He tilted the camera up to show the vault. A large block of stone sat below the center of the vault. Stairs had been carved into the stone. “It is the only inscription in the room.”

“Show it again.”

The camera bore down on the stone, and the inscription came into view, but the light directly on the smooth limestone created a glare that made it illegible on the screen.

“Dim the floodlight,” Salah ad-Din said evenly, but there was anticipation in his voice.

As the light softened, the inscription came into sharp view, just as he had seen it himself a minute before.

So the menorah is not beneath Jerusalem
. Salah ad-Din had suspected the ingenious nature of Josephus’s plan for years, and calculated accordingly.

Salah ad-Din dialed the number of his exchange server in Paris, which connected him through to a cell phone in Rome.

The other line answered and Salah ad-Din uttered one word.