The Last Ember (41 page)

“Ostia,” he spoke into his satellite phone.

“You saw the inscription? You are certain?” a nervous female voice said.

“Yes, it is in Ostia. When will the plane arrive?”

“Forty minutes. The Gaza border, just as you arranged.”

“I must excavate today. I require maps immediately.”

“Ostia spans three miles,” the voice said. “How will you know where to dig?”

“Josephus disclosed the menorah’s location in a line of text.”

“But to see the Renaissance manuscripts of Josephus, you will require access to the Sala Consultazione Manoscritti in the Vatican Library.”

“The information I need is not in the Vatican Library,” Salah ad-Din said. “It is in the archives of the Great Synagogue in Rome.”

J
onathan tumbled through twenty feet of black air before splashing feet-first into a thick bed of pond scum. The algae nearly immobilized his arms, but his legs moved more freely, treading in the water. A slim curtain of daylight illuminated the cavern through a crevasse.

“Emili!” Jonathan yelled.

A hand tightly gripped his arm and he whirled around. Emili surfaced beside him, her face covered in thick ropes of pond scum.

“So the roots will hold us, huh?” Emili slowly shook her head.

He wiped a piece of algae off her cheek. “You okay?”

“
Okay? A
crazed man with a Kalashnikov is thirty feet above us, and I don’t see a way out of here. ‘Okay’ would be an exaggeration.”

They waded through the sludge and climbed onto a narrow rock bank at the far end of the cavern. Emili slipped, knocking a stone from the bank into the water.

“Maybe if we could climb up these roots—” Jonathan began, and then stopped, staring at the stone that had just rolled into the water. It had broken through the pond scum. The water was a radiant blue, as though illuminated from beneath.

Jonathan stared at the water, transfixed. “Why is the water glowing?”

“What are you talking about? It can’t be glo—” Emili looked down.

An incandescent blue glow emanated in the shape of the rock that had broken through the algae. It looked like an expensively lit resort pool.

Jonathan cleared more of the surface. The whole pond was a vivid, electric blue.

“Why is it that color?”

“There must be an opening under the water, allowing light to flood through.” Jonathan turned to Emili. “We’ll have to swim through it.”

Jonathan rolled up his soaking sleeves for greater ease in the water. Emili grabbed his arm.

“Jon, we don’t even know where it goes!”

There was a sudden splash behind them.

“The Waqf guards are lowering ropes,” Jonathan said. The shouts in Arabic grew louder, and guns banged against the rock face.

Emili looked uneasily at the water.

“
Al tre si parte?
” she said. Count of three, then?

Jonathan nodded. “Deep breath. Follow me to the bottom.”

“One.”

A flashlight panned across the water and held them in its beam. They heard the triumphant shout of a Waqf guard.

“Two,” Emili said, squeezing Jonathan’s hand. Their gazes turned to the black water. “Three!”

They both dived in, and swam toward the light, kicking deeper into the water’s enveloping peace. The sloshing of the Waqf guards above them sounded miles away. The light under the water grew brighter, moving from a purple bruise to a pastel cloud as the pressure in their ears mounted. Near the floor of the pond they could see a rock hollow, a glowing circle just large enough to swim through. Emili went first, propelling herself into the blue light. Jonathan’s dress shirt floated around him as he moved through the hole after her, taking giant breast strokes upward. On all sides of them, high-tech underwater tube-lighting came into view.

A
tour group of visiting Southern Baptists from the Valley of Souls Congregation in Hillsboro, West Virginia, stared at the peaceful subterranean pool of water before returning to their air-conditioned bus parked outside the Hezekiah Tunnel tour. After a moment of silent prayer, Pastor Josiah Briggens, the group’s animated preacher, led them in a reading from Psalms in the dark tunnel by candlelight. The congregation was hushed with awe, gazing at the underground spring, where according to Gospel, Jesus cured the blind. The reverend boomed Psalm 91 in a thick West Virginia twang.

“And let us learn from these peaceful waters,” he said. His congregants looked devoutly at the electric blue water, standing at the farthest point permitted for tour groups inside the ancient tunnel.

“That these waters,” the reverend cried out, “should spread their calm over Israel, that their stillness will—”

As if on cue, the still surface of the water shattered like glass.

Jonathan and Emili broke through, splashing wildly, gasping for air.

The Valley of Souls members were stunned. Many screamed as others fell to their knees, crying out, “Hallelujah, father!”

Jonathan and Emili swam to the shore.

“Sweet Mary and Joseph!” the preacher screamed.

Jonathan smiled politely.

“Well, not exactly.”

T
he tunnel to Gaza is still open?” Salah ad-Din asked the driver. He knew that recent Israeli incursions had discovered many of the tunnels his men had used for years to cross beneath the Gaza-Israel border.

“Yes, Sheikh,” the driver, a young mullah, said. He pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road beside an abandoned roadside fruit stand. Now boarded up, the stand’s faded Arabic sign for fresh pomegranates flapped in the desert wind. The driver looked at an illuminated grid of a palm-held global positioning device to confirm their location. He turned around and nodded solemnly to Salah ad-Din. This was the location where Salah ad-Din had to cross through a system of tunnels to reach Gaza. On the other side, a plane would transport him to Rome.

The fruit stand was one hundred meters from the first of a series of triple barbed-wire fences between there and the Gaza Strip.

The mullah removed an old pistol from beneath the driver’s seat. He stepped out of the car and walked toward the fruit stand. He returned a moment later and opened the sedan’s rear door.

“The tunnel is secure, Sheikh,” he said in Arabic.

Salah ad-Din approached the fruit stand. He pulled one of the pine-board side panels loose and stepped into the booth. Bending down, he lifted part of the floor to reveal the opening of an arms smuggler’s tunnel. He slipped into the tunnel, moving the board back into place above him. The air in the tunnel was thick, smelling of wet cement.

Salah ad-Din felt his way through the tunnel’s darkness. It was a good, tall tunnel, and he ducked only slightly as he walked. Arms dealers dug the best tunnels between Gaza and Israel, he knew. Passing under the high stone cement wall that separated Gaza from Israel, he could hear the Hebrew chatter of Israeli soldiers on border patrol above him.

The tunnel’s exit was another two hundred meters inside the Gaza Strip.

Salah ad-Din reached the end and climbed a ladder up into another roadside shack. As he emerged, he saw an old-model BMW waiting for him, its white paint peeling, headlights dimmed by the swirling gales of sand. Salah ad-Din climbed into the backseat.

The car headed south until reaching the Gaza border with Egypt. Salah ad-Din got out of the car and slid through a sawed opening in the electrified border fence. On the other side, he walked across an abandoned stretch of broken asphalt, where he could see the tail of a midnight-blue Cessna Citation X with Egyptian military clearance. Salah ad-Din chose this particular plane from an Iranian sheikh’s wide collection, not only because its dual hydraulic engines made it the fastest civilian aircraft in the world, but because its flying altitude of 51,000 feet made it imperceptible on most radars. The Cessna had nearly turned around before landing here, because of the windstorm that now transformed the desert air into a thick orange haze in all directions.

As Salah ad-Din walked toward the plane, the wind felt solid and he covered his face with his sleeve. A man in a tightly wrapped kaffiyeh escorted him up the aluminum steps to the plane.

“Less than three hours until we arrive in Rome, Sheikh,” he said loudly in the wind. “The team has already begun in Ostia.”

I
nside the Rockefeller Museum, Jonathan and Emili waited in Eilat Segev’s office. They wore white jumpsuits that Segev supplied from the conservationist laboratory while their clothing machine-dried in the basement. Segev forced them to have some hot tea as she brought out an archaeological map of Ostia from the museum’s library and unrolled it across her desk.

“If you’re right, think of the sheer planning required for Josephus to smuggle something the menorah’s size to Rome,” Segev said. Ever the intelligence tactician at heart, she could not help but admire the scale of the ancient logistical effort.

“Josephus wrote in his histories that he survived a shipwreck,” Jonathan said. “The cargo was supposedly lost, but—”

“—but that might have been the perfect cover to move its cargo to the port outside Rome,” Segev finished.

“But if the menorah is in Rome, then why would Josephus make someone go to Jerusalem to find that out?” Emili interjected. After the second century, Jews could not even step foot in Roman-occupied Jerusalem.

“And that’s the brilliance of Josephus’s plan,” Jonathan said. He stood up from his chair and paced, just as Emili remembered him doing in the academy library. “By revealing the menorah’s final location beneath the Mount, Josephus tried to ensure that his descendants would have regained sovereignty over Jerusalem. The menorah, once discovered, could be restored immediately to its ceremonial purpose. But if his descendants discovered the menorah while still exiled in Rome, they would have no sanctuary to put it in. Remember, we’re talking about eight feet of solid gold here. Greed would endanger the lamp just as much as the Roman siege did.”

“And the one place Josephus knew he could get the menorah to was Ostia,” Emili said. “That’s the port where all the Roman ships returned after Jerusalem’s conquest.”

Emili tented over the map on Segev’s desk.
Ostia,
she thought,
of all places
. She knew the drama of Ostia’s rediscovery in the nineteenth century. Under dozens of feet of mud and silt, archaeologists found its paved streets, mosaic-tiled baths, and frescoed taverns at a level of preservation that rivaled Pompeii’s.

“Have your Israeli teams done any work in Ostia?” Emili asked Segev. Segev glanced up at a photograph of herself in army uniform that hung above her desk. “Not any archaeological work, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the early 1970s, the modern city of Ostia harbored local Palestinian terrorists, because of its proximity to Fiumicino airport. In October 1973, Mossad agents arrested five Palestinians in their apartment in Ostia. Two Russian SA-7 missiles and an El Al flight schedule were in the closet.”

Jonathan looked up from the map.

“You are not going to believe this,” he said, angling the archaeological sketch of Ostia toward Emili and Segev. He pointed along the central line of the town. “Here is the Decumanus
,
or main thoroughfare. It branches off to a diagonal road, to this small building.” He pointed at the words written in Italian inside it.
Sinagoga Antica
.

“That’s right, I should have remembered,” Segev said. “Outside of Israel, the ruins of Ostia contain the oldest standing synagogue in the world.”

“That’s not even the strange part. Look here, next to the synagogue, at the small neighboring structure. It’s got a most unusual name.”

“Domus Fulminata,” Segev read haltingly.

“House of Divine Fire,” Jonathan said. “
Fulmen
means ‘lightning,’ or any kind of fire sent by the gods.”

“So it was a pagan temple, then,” Emili said.

“Except that the orientation is east, and pagan temples often faced westward. And most important, a synagogue never would have been built so close unless—”

“Divine Fire had a different meaning,” Emili said. “Like a place of safekeeping for a sacred vessel of fire.”

Emili sat back in her chair. “It’s brilliant,” she said.

“Yes it was,” Jonathan smiled. “What better disguise was there to keep the menorah from Titus’s secret police than to give its sanctuary a pagan name?”

L
ieutenant Brandisi cautiously stepped into Profeta’s office, holding a stack of manila folders under one arm.

“Yes, Brandisi?” Profeta asked, not looking up.

“The staff at the Colosseum just couriered over the files we requested. They’re mainly carbon copies of each
permesso
signed by the archaeological superintendent, allowing archaeologists and construction crews access to the substructure of the Colosseum.”

“Construction crews?”

“The United Nations’ annual World Heritage Committee meeting has scheduled its opening ceremony tomorrow inside the Colosseum.”

“Yes, I saw the scaffolding for the performances.”

“Scaffolding for which the crews were granted access to the
northern
end of the Colosseum,” Brandisi added. “I called the International Center for Conservation. Director Olivier’s office confirmed that to minimize strain on the structure, the ceremony will take place only in the northern section of the Colosseum’s oval. That’s the part closer to the Via del Colosseo. But it appears some personnel made repeated trips to the
southern
section of the Colosseum’s oval where there was no scaffolding.”

“Near the corridor we discovered this morning,” Profeta said, in anticipation.

“To the exact corridor,
Comandante
,” Brandisi said. “There were personnel entering the ruin through precisely the same arch that we saw Dr. Emili Travia enter on the surveillance camera.”