The Last Ember (2 page)

S
ignore,”
the chauffeur said.

The Maserati had stopped in Piazza Navona in downtown Rome. The chauffeur let the engine idle.

Jonathan leaned forward. “I haven’t received any information where to go.”

The chauffeur said nothing, only pointed to the floodlit Baroque façade of a sixteenth-century palazzo at the far end of the piazza.

A line from Jonathan’s graduate work in Latin literature came back to him.
“Ducunt volentem Fata
,
nolentem trahunt,”
he murmured.

His eyes met the chauffeur’s in the rearview mirror when, to Jonathan’s amazement, the chauffeur translated the phrase from Seneca.

 

 

* The Euphronios Krater was in the Metropolitan’s collection for thirty years before the museum returned it to Italy in January 2008.

“‘Follow the fates,’” the chauffeur said, “‘for they will drag you anyway.’”

A
fter midnight in an abandoned warehouse along the Roman shipping docks of Civitavecchia, Comandante Jacopo Profeta removed a snub-nosed Tanfaglio combat pistol from its holster, drawing its trigger back to allow a cylinder rotation check. As commander of the Italian Cultural Heritage Protection, or Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, the world’s most sophisticated antiquities crimes investigation unit, Profeta knew artifact raids had grown increasingly dangerous. He had more than 250 officers in eleven regions to assist investigations, ranging from staking out a deadly excavation site in Pompeii to conducting tonight’s raid of a portside warehouse in search of illicit antiquities.

“The Taliban used the opium trade to finance their activities,” Comandante Profeta often reminded his officers, “but terrorists have discovered a new source of revenue: antiquities. These men are not archaeologists. They are murderers.”

Profeta’s flashlight cut the warehouse’s blackness. The rank scent of fermented olive oil mingled with the stench of sewage and rust. Weeds had reclaimed the warehouse’s overgrown floor. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shattered windowpane. With receding silvery hair cropped close to his skull, gold spectacles framing his lumbering brown eyes, and a gray beard in need of a trim, Profeta resembled a strong but aging sailor too long at sea.

O
utside the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem, four men on a scaffold wore stolen restoration jumpsuits with “UNESCO” printed across the back. Their forged and laminated identification tags bore the seal of the Jordanian Hashemite Cultural Ministry, which gave them permission to restore the shrine’s exterior medieval blue tiles. But restoration was not their intent. Their muffled drills whirled through the marble latticework around a second-story window to access the sanctuary below. They worked with the well-rehearsed efficiency of bank robbers burrowing into a vault.

“Sheikh Salah ad-Din, we have removed the window,” said Ahmed Hassan, a talented young bomb maker.

Salah ad-Din did not acknowledge the boy, keeping his gaze on three laptop computers fixed to the base of the scaffolding. He ran his hand over the black stubble that carpeted his head. His copper complexion, thin, straight nose, and light, chrome-colored eyes made him appear more European than Arab. His meticulously clean-shaven face and wired spectacles gave him a thoughtful, academic air, as if he might have been a young faculty member at Nazir or Gaza University. He did not resemble a man whom Interpol had hunted for years and who was known in the organization’s files only by his nom de guerre, Salah ad-Din, the name of the twelfth-century Islamic warrior who defended Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

Grid images of the Dome’s interior octagonal structure rotated on the laptop screens. To Salah ad-Din, the Dome of the Rock’s perfect mathematical proportions were far more important than the shrine’s religious significance. Those proportions had determined the length of rope required for his team to rappel inside.

With military focus, Salah ad-Din checked the black digital chronograph on his arm: 1:13 a.m. “We must enter immediately,” he said. “Come, Professor.”

“We are not ready yet,” replied Professor Gustavo Cianari, a balding little man. He nervously removed his glasses, which revealed eyes as beady and squinting as a nocturnal animal’s. “The passage in Josephus does not reveal the artifact’s location, only that it was moved through a Hidden Gate.”

“Which is why I rescued you from your academic dungeon in Rome,” Salah ad-Din said. “You are perhaps the only living scholar in the world who could have deciphered the hidden gates’ location from the tattoo on that woman.”

“
That woman
was the last princess of Jerusalem,” Professor Cianari said, offended by his employer’s disrespectful tone. “She chose death in the Colosseum, rather than reveal the meaning of
umbilicus orbis terrarum.
‘The Navel of the World.’ You saw her level of royal preservation.”

“And as of ten minutes ago, so have the carabinieri. Your Italian police just discovered our research facility in Rome. We must find the artifact
tonight
.” Salah ad-Din stepped toward the small man. “Think of it, Professor. An artifact for which Titus conquered all of Jerusalem, but still failed to bring back to Rome.”

Reluctantly, the professor followed Salah ad-Din up the scaffolding and through the spade-shaped hole where the arabesque window had been. Now inside the shrine, they stood on an interior ledge forty feet above the sanctuary floor. The professor’s trepidation gave way to awe at the grandeur of the Dome of the Rock’s interior. The vast octagonal sanctuary resembled an orientalized Saint Peter’s Basilica, a cavernous pavilion of inlaid marble walls and decoration funded by centuries of Arab conquest. Rays of moonlight checkered through latticework windows and converged on the gilded shrine’s most precious treasure: the Foundation Stone, or Al-Sakhra, which was the natural summit of the Temple Mount—a large promontory of bedrock that stretched thirty square feet inside a protective fence and was further secured by the red crossbeams of motion detectors hovering above it.

Cianari’s archaeology students in Rome never ceased to be astonished that the enclosed floor of bedrock was more precious than the gold dome above it. “The world’s largest encased jewel,” Professor Cianari called the thirty-square-foot stone. It was the most sacred ground on earth to three religions: the very spot described in Genesis where, according to Christianity and Judaism, the patriarch Abraham bound his son Isaac at the sacrificial altar and where one thousand years later Solomon would build the Holy of Holies of the First Temple. A rectangular depression in the center of the rock is said to have been the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant before the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. And, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad ascended to heaven from this rock, and the faithful still view the embedded hoofprint of El Burak, the horse that transported him.

“There, ‘The Navel of the World,’” Salah ad-Din said, pointing at a hole in the southern end of the rock. “When the Roman troops breached the Temple walls in A.D. 70, the priest moved the artifact through there into a tunnel beneath the stone.” He spoke as though seeking a fugitive who had escaped only hours before.

“Unfortunately, whatever lies beneath the Foundation Stone is inaccessible,” the professor said, secretly relieved that this man’s obsessive quest might finally come to an end. “The motion detectors prevent any access to the stone from the ground.”

“From the ground, Professor,” Salah ad-Din said, “but not from above.”

Ahmed assisted Salah ad-Din to slip his legs through a Velcro harness and secured a high-tensile-strength rope through a belay device.

“You intend to rappel
through
the stone?” Professor Cianari said.

As his answer, Salah ad-Din stepped off the ledge and descended through the sanctuary’s dim air as though climbing down the rungs of moonlight. The professor watched, in horror and fascination, as Salah ad-Din floated through the center of the Dome, moving forty feet downward and ultimately through the aperture in the Foundation Stone—easily avoiding the flickering red lasers that protected the sacred rock’s perimeter. From the ledge the professor could hear the harness jangle as Salah ad-Din touched down inside the crypt beneath the stone.

The professor heard the sound of imams approaching the outer doors of the sanctuary. The empty harness returned to the ledge. Two men brusquely grabbed him, shoved his stout legs into the harness, and lowered him after the sheikh. As the professor descended, he noticed, to his amazement, that the Foundation Stone’s surface was more textured than he ever imagined. Crevices in the ancient surface undulated like frozen storm waves, as if making visual the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition that from this single stone, the entire earth expanded in all directions.

And Cianari now regretted that it was he who had led Salah ad-Din here, to the exact center of the world.
Umbilicus Orbis Terrarum.

Professor Cianari tightened his grip on the harness, moving through the opening of the stone. Beneath this sacred rock, unborn souls were said to gather, and the sudden sound of whispers chilled him to the core.

He disappeared through the hole in the Foundation Stone and his breathing shortened, as though somehow knowing he was forever parting with the world above him.

J
onathan stepped out of the sedan into Piazza Navona. The tourists, caricaturists, and performers who gave the piazza its life during the day were long asleep, the outdoor tables stacked and chained for the night. The bristles of a street-cleaning
spazzatrice
hissed past.