The Last Ember (51 page)

“No,” Jonathan whispered. Salah ad-Din stood before him in the light, and Jonathan understood the whole loathsome trick.

“In ancient myth, Jon, who creates the hero?” Sharif Lebag said, level ing the gun at Emili’s forehead. “The villain.”

I
’ve often wondered,” Sharif said, “what did Titus look like at the moment he learned it was Josephus who had betrayed him?” Sharif spoke with unnerving nonchalance, raising his free arm theatrically. “There Titus was, sweating in his villa, poring over tactical routes out of the Temple Mount, to discover how the sacred relic escaped under his nose. Only his most trusted courtier sat at his side reviewing the sketches with him. Someone who was invaluable to his siege of Jerusalem. His personal
historian
, Flavius Josephus. I’ve imagined it over and over again. That moment Titus realized a lone historian defeated a man no army in the world could. His trusted adviser who had deceived him for years, earning greater access to the emperor with each flattering history he published.

Sharif looked only vaguely familiar to Jonathan. This man’s eyes revealed something removed and cruel, a transfigured version of his former self.

“But now, Jonathan, I finally know the expression on Titus’s face when the betrayal dawned on him with the force of the sun. It’s the expression on your face right now,” Sharif said with satisfaction.

“Jerusalem was all a setup,” Jonathan said, feeling strangely little.

Jonathan looked to Sharif’s side, where Emili struggled in shadow. “You monitored Emili’s research, but did not count on the informer in the marketplace, did you? You had to end her research there in disgrace, just as you ended mine.”

“I let her live!” Sharif said. “After she saw my research beneath Jerusalem. Have you any idea how many wanted her dead?”

“How long have you been leading this double life? How long ago did those imams at the Temple Mount brainwash you into conducting this search for the menorah?”

“Those imams understand nothing of my task! Do you know why they destroy relics under the Temple Mount? It is because they believe those Jewish and Christian relics have power. They believe in that hocus-pocus of impurity.” Sharif spoke evenly, exhibiting an uncanny ease at having a gun in his hand.

“I am not so naive. The relic must be destroyed to erase the
history
of a Temple on the Mount. The al-Quds fund agreed to support my research if my first excavation seven years ago went undetected.”

“You knew the truth of my Josephus thesis even before I did. It’s why you convinced us to enter the catacombs in the middle of the night. . . .”

Jonathan could see the three of them, Emili, Jonathan, and Gianpaolo, being lowered into the catacomb. And who encouraged them, who volunteered to work the pulley above the manhole rather than descend into the ruin? The fourth young graduate student, Sharif Lebag. How selfless it seemed at the time, to have put in all that research, diagramming the subterranean corridors, only to sit by the manhole, like a trained astronaut remaining at ground control. But Sharif’s decision was inevitable. He knew the ruin was going to crumble. He had arranged the entire thing.

“You can’t win, Sharif,” Jonathan said. “You cannot manipulate history.”

“Do you believe that, Marcus? Or don’t you lawyers manipulate history just as I do? Looking for documents to support your clients’ version of the past. If you unearth a relic that supports the other side’s case, what do you do? You shred it. Or you bury it in one of those document rooms where it will never see the light of day. It’s rather like destroying some artifacts and not others. You think I’m driven by childish religious belief ? I’m a political realist. Like Titus. Strength is the author of history, Jon, not truth.”

Sharif had so completely become this persona that only small pieces of his former self were visible. His understated air and small gesticulations had vanished.

“Just let her go, and I will help you,” Jonathan said.

“Let her go?” Salah ad-Din said mockingly. He pulled Emili’s hair violently, burrowing the gun’s barrel deeper into her temple. “Do you understand the lengths I went to bring both of you here? Orchestrating the fragment of the Forma Urbis so that she would bring this case and you would return to Rome.” Sharif stepped toward Jonathan, joining him in the single shaft of light pouring down from the street drain above them.

“I knew you would unlock Josephus’s messages.
I needed you to
.” He stared at Jonathan with an eerie mixture of familiarity and ruthlessness.

Salah ad-Din inched closer. “Does the shape of these arched stairways surprise you?” A ray of light glinted off the barrel of the gun in his hand. “Seven staircases in the shape of the menorah itself, each joining to reach a single platform, where an archway through the dam leads to the lost Arch of Titus. Of course, only one bridge is structurally strong enough. All you have to do is choose the correct staircase.” He pulled Emili’s hair, her bloodshot eyes beaded with tears, silently pleading.

“Which one is it?” Sharif asked, motioning to the stairs leading up to the wall. “You have until the count of three.”

“I don’t know!” Jonathan said softly, and then louder, stammering. “How—There’s no way to know!”

“Then there’s no sense in counting, is there?” He stood back from Emili, straightening his arm to shoot her.

“No!” a shout came out of the darkness. Salah ad-Din’s flashlight beam searched the ridge of the basin, and there Mosè Orvieti stood, holding his slender green oxygen tank with both hands, his pants caked in dried blood.

Orvieti managed to slide down to the basin’s floor and walked past them to the base of the seven stairwells. He turned around, glaring at Sharif, his voice fueled with disdain.

“I know which one it is,” Orvieti said. He leaned over the first step of the middle staircase and rubbed its stone with the sole of his shoe. The inscribed letters revealed themselves in large block Hebrew print.

“Each staircase represents a different
sefirah
, a divine attribute through which the world was created,” he said. “The branches of the menorah represent seven of them.” He walked to the next staircase, knelt against the first step, and uncovered another inscription.
“Gevurah,”
Orvieti read.

“What does it mean?”

“Strength.”

One by one, Orvieti cleared the first step of each stairwell, calling out each
sefirah
: “
Tipheret
, splendor.
Chesed
, kindness.
Malchut
, majesty.
Hod
, glory.”

“Which is it?” Jonathan said. “What attribute would Josephus have most associated with the menorah? Splendor?”

“None of these,” Orvieti said. He walked toward the one remaining arched staircase, which rose along the western wall of the basin. He rubbed the first step and there was no inscription.

Orvieti looked at Jonathan. “This is the one. The seventh branch,” he said.

“There is no inscription,” Jonathan said.

“The remaining
sefirah
is
netzach
, eternity. The seventh branch was the eternal light, the
ne’er tamid
,” Orvieti said. “The enduring light that Josephus fought to save.”

“You’re sure,” Jonathan asked softly.

“Not at all,” Orvieti said.

“Go!” Sharif yelled, flicking his head toward the stairs. He turned to Jonathan. “And you go with him.”

“Those stairs are thousands of years old,” Orvieti said. “They cannot hold more than—”

“Take him!” Sharif yelled. “Perhaps you’ll choose more carefully.”

Jonathan walked forward, standing beside Orvieti. Both of them looked at the seven flanking arches of staircases.

Swinging his small oxygen tank in front of him, Orvieti ascended the first ancient step of the arched stairway. Jonathan followed, feeling the stones tremble beneath their weight. Orvieti walked up the arch’s steps rather unceremoniously and Jonathan was surprised at his pace. His legs climbed swiftly, as though propelled by the same adrenaline that moved Jonathan rapidly behind him. Moving quickly helped them with their balance on the narrow beam of the staircase, and as they neared the apex of the arch, Jonathan tried not to look down into the blackness of the abyss below. Suddenly, the stone arch made a cracking sound beneath their feet, and Jonathan stopped.

“Keep moving,” Orvieti said.

As they neared the platform at the top of the stairs, the enormous size of the retaining wall became apparent. The stones were each twenty feet in length, bearing an unmistakable similarity to the construction of Jerusalem’s Temple walls. They stepped onto the platform, and noticed that the small archway leading into the wall from the platform was bricked up with smaller stones.

“The arch is bricked up!” Jonathan yelled down to Salah ad-Din.

On the platform, Orvieti stood motionless in front of the bricked-up arch. He stared at a short Hebraic inscription that had been carved above.

“Dry Land in the Midst of the Sea,” Orvieti translated. He looked up in Jonathan’s direction. “It’s a passage from Exodus. When the Red Sea split, the Israelites walked on dry land in the middle of the sea.”

“What does it mean?”

As if to answer, the platform on which Jonathan and Orvieti stood began to tremble and slowly lowered a half-foot. Jonathan thought the platform could not hold them both when suddenly it stopped, as though fitted to a ratchet. A loud cracking sound reverberated throughout the cavern, and one of the arched staircases snapped backward, its heavy stones careening toward the basin floor. The structural instability spread like a contagion, as the wall before them began to shake.

“The stairs were not the test,” Orvieti said. “This is the test.”

The wall’s enormous stones began to buckle outward. Jonathan watched small trickles of water bleed through the cracks, as though in slow motion, navigating the contours of the stones. The streaming water gathered force as boulder-sized stones shuddered and loosened. “The wall is going to burst!” Jonathan screamed. “We have to get—”

“This is the only safe place,” Orvieti said.

You’ve gone mad,
Jonathan thought. “We’re right in front of the wall, Mosè! The river! This whole basin will be—”

“The Red Sea,” Orvieti said calmly.

“What!” Jonathan screamed over the breaking rocks.

“You must believe in the splitting of the sea,” Orvieti said.

 

 

 

The water began to flow into the center of the cavern. Sharif lifted his gun, preparing to fire at Jonathan and Orvieti on the platform. He cocked his elbows, using both hands to steady the pistol’s aim.

He’s going to shoot them both,
Emili thought.

Emili slid behind Salah ad-Din and, throwing her arms over his head, yanked her wrists’ plastic restraints against his throat. Unable to point his gun behind him, Salah ad-Din threw himself backward, sending them both beneath the surface of the rising waters in the cavern. Emili managed to remain fastened around Sharif’s neck, keeping him underwater, but his stubble-short hair was slippery and he managed to corkscrew his head out of her grip.

Without use of her arms, Emili was unable to get up and could barely keep her mouth above the rising water.

Sharif now stood over her, aimed his black pistol at her forehead. He ripped off the duct tape from her mouth.

“Parting words?”

“You know, Sharif,” Emili said, stretching her neck above the water, “you turned out to be a real asshole.”

Sharif pressed the barrel below her hairline and pulled the trigger.

The pistol’s hammer hit the barrel’s firing contact with the deadened sound of a water-flooded gun.

Salah ad-Din appeared amused. “Luck
does
favor the brave.”

At that moment, a sudden force bowled Sharif into the rising water of the cavern. Jonathan had run back down the staircase and blindsided him, tackling Sharif from the side. They landed in the churning green-gray water a foot from the reservoir’s rock wall. Jonathan noticed Sharif’s frame floating beneath him, lifeless, facedown. Red clouds gathered in the water, and Jonathan rolled him over to see a large jagged rock protruding from the surface of the water where his head had collided. As though moved by a force outside him, he lifted Sharif’s head out of the water and let it fall again with a grotesque thud against the protruding rock. Another red cloud mushroomed in the water.

“That’s for Gianpaolo.”

Jonathan staggered up and waded through the water to Emili.

Emili remained kneeling in the rising water, which was already up to her waist. A bright red rectangle around her lips indicated where the duct tape had been. She blinked rapidly, her eyes moving over his face, as though inspecting an artifact.

“It’s me,” Jonathan said, attempting his most reassuring smile. He tried, unsuccessfully, to release the plastic restraints around her wrists.