The Last Ember (37 page)

“Why France?” Jonathan said.

“Carcassonne, to be exact. I was still in intelligence on foreign security at the time,” Segev said. “In 1979, an Israeli secret service security detail was dispatched to Carcassonne, where myths had circulated for centuries that the menorah was buried. I suppose the premise is laughable, but from my own graduate work at Hebrew University I thought the location made sense. The Goths sacked Rome in A.D. 410, forty-five years
before
the more famous sack by Carthage. So it would have been the Goths who took the menorah, in which case the menorah would have followed the Goths to southern France—Carcassonne, to be exact. Golda Meir approved the project, but only if the operation could be done quietly enough, without Israeli taxpayers knowing the Mossad was chasing after legends.” She shrugged. “Of course, their two weeks of investigations turned up nothing but local madmen and cheap relic shops playing up the mystery of buried treasure. The only remaining possible location, of course, is beneath the Temple Mount itself.” Segev shook her head, crestfallen. “Which in this political climate makes it—”

“All the more important for us,” Emili interrupted, “to find which convent in Jerusalem was described as the ‘canonical convent’ on the mural of the Roman synagogue. We need to see the model.”

Emili and Jonathan followed Segev down a spiral stairwell into a storage area. Lights flicked on one after another, illuminating a damp vaulted cellar. In the middle of the room, a sprawling metallic model of a city spread thirty feet in each direction.

“The detail is remarkable,” Jonathan said.

“It weighs more than a ton.” Segev pointed at the model. “You should be able to find the convent here.”

Find the convent?
Jonathan leaned over.
You could find a nineteenth-century piece of litter on this thing.
Along the perimeter of the model, the outer Ottoman walls made a rectangle on the ridge along the Valley of Kidron. Inside the city walls, the model portrayed every street and alleyway, even the flags on the various monasteries as well as small crescents that stood on top of one of the Ottoman fortresses. Perched atop a high plateau overlooking the alleyways, the ruins of the Temple Mount were in a relative state of abandonment. The model portrayed the crumbling wooden dome of the Dome of the Rock as it was in 1873.

“These retaining walls built during the Roman era still support the Temple Mount platform,” Segev said. With a red laser pointer, she indicated the Temple Mount area. “Each is roughly seventy feet of Herodian stone in height. Although it is a secret where this man Salah ad-Din bases his operations, we know the Waqf has renovated subterranean vaults in the cisterns along the northwest corner of the Mount here.” Her laser pointer now moved along the northern wall of the Mount. “We believe the dump trucks come in through here, Bab el-Asbat
,
known as the Lion’s Gate, which is not in view of any of the churches or synagogues of the Old City. When the trucks exit, they dump the archaeological finds in the Valley of Kidron, here”—her laser pointer circled an area in a valley hundreds of feet beneath the Old City’s outer walls—“among this grove of olive trees.” A copse of olive trees with their gnarled trunks was represented in the model with exquisite detail.

“They have hollowed out so much of the Temple Mount that this wall, here”—Emili pointed at a section of the southern wall of the model—“is in danger of collapse. For years, UNESCO teams have been working on stabilizing the wall from the outside. That is what first brought Sharif here as a visiting staff member.”

Jonathan wandered around to the other side of the model.

“Emili!”

“What?”

“There is a cannon on top of this steeple.” He pointed at a miniature stone convent half a foot along the model’s scale from the Temple Mount. There was a shiny silver cannon above the domed convent roof.

“The Sisters of Zion Convent,” Segev said. She could see Emili’s plan beginning to materialize.

“Don’t even think about it, please,” Segev said maternally. “We cannot protect you inside the Mount. You are crossing into a place beyond our law. I will not even be able to say I have assisted you in getting inside.”

S
alah ad-Din moved through the tunnel as though blasting through the rock with each step.

“From this point,” Salah ad-Din said, exhilarated, “the tunnel should have been sealed since the first century.”

Unfortunately,
Ramat thought,
it almost certainly has been.
He knew the earthquake of A.D. 363 closed off most of the passageways beneath the Mount, protecting many of its vaults from mystics, medieval souvenir hunters, and even the famed Templars. Ramat’s guilt swelled.
Because of me, the first man walking through this aqueduct since the Roman era is no better than Titus.

The tunnel was chipped from bedrock, not limestone, so there was little detritus. Salah ad-Din’s men were running ribbed yellow hoses along the center of the tunnel to remove the dust.

The tunnel’s ceiling grew higher, and with his flashlight Salah ad-Din illuminated Roman-era carvings of intricate biblical imagery and fan tastical animals: a lion with wings and the talons of an eagle, a snake that walked like a man. As they passed, one of the men behind Salah ad-Din sprayed large red X’s on each carving, identifying them to be destroyed.

Salah ad-Din led the team farther into the corridor. He rounded a corner and stopped. Dark and shaggy moss, thick as an ancient beard, coated a wall in front of him. He traced his flashlight’s beam along the top of the ceiling, exposing a brightly patinaed metallic trim.

Salah ad-Din stepped carefully toward the moss, studying the ground’s stones as he walked. Moving his arm slowly, he pulled a long knife from his waist and reached into the moss, his arm disappearing nearly to his shoulder. He reached something solid and tapped it with the point of the blade. It tinged with the sound of metal against metal.

“The hidden gate was a bronze gate, according to Josephus,” Salah ad-Din rasped, out of breath. “This must be it.”

“That door is three meters high,” Ramat whispered, standing behind Salah ad-Din in awe. “It will take days to unhinge.”

Salah ad-Din ignored him, taking in the size of the ancient structure with a clinical gaze.

“Evacuate all men from inside the Mount,” he said. “Removing this door will require our largest blast.” He turned to Ahmed. “Place the spices under the ticket counter in the Western Wall plaza by eight a.m.” His eyes returned to the ancient bronze door. “The distraction must be simultaneous.”

I
n East Jerusalem, Jonathan and Emili followed Segev through the Arab souk toward the Sisters of Zion Convent. Even at seven in the morning, the Old City market had an animal breath all its own. In its labyrinth of stone alleyways, an open-air butcher assaulted the carcasses of sheep and goats for the morning market. The butcher cautioned them to watch their step, pointing to stones slick with animal viscera. The only sound was his transistor radio, softly playing Iranian pop music.

Deeper into the souk, among the shuttered stalls nestled beneath intricately carved stone balconies, some booths already had a carnival atmosphere, where old men argued furiously over the day’s first fruit deliveries stacked between the stone ramparts. Kaffiyehs and
tabus
, long dresses for men, dangled from the ceiling, and Jonathan and Emili pushed through them as through vines of a thick, disorienting jungle. Under a bare light-bulb, one shopkeeper took inventory of his goods before the morning market. Jonathan noticed him stacking framed pictures of Yasser Arafat, alongside T-shirts emblazoned with “My Bubby Loves the Kotel
.
”

“Now, that vendor is diversified,” Jonathan commented.

“Commerce doesn’t have the luxury of intolerance,” Emili said. She knew that some of the most successful illegal relic trading in the world was between Sunnis and Shiites who overlooked their religious differences to smuggle antiquities out of Iraq.

“Here it is,” Jonathan said when they reached the façade of the Sisters of Zion Convent.

They knocked on the heavy oak door.

Silence, then the unlocking of a bolt. The door was opened cautiously.

Through the opening, a tall, thin woman appeared. From her mid-length blue dress, gray sweater, and flat white shoes, Emili knew she was a member of the Sisterhood of Zion, a Roman Catholic sect dating to the mid-nineteenth century. She appeared to be in her late forties, despite the youthful auburn hair that ran down her back.

“May we speak with the abbess?” Emili said in English. “I am afraid the matter is urgent.”

“The abbess is unavailable at the moment,” the woman replied in an Australian accent.

“But the matter is quite—”

“I am sorry. The convent is only open to visitors from the hours of—”

“We have information about an illegal excavation near your convent’s basement,” Emili said.

The door stopped just short of closing shut. “Excuse me?” said the woman.

Emili sensed her sudden interest. “An illegal excavation. It may pose a danger to the convent.”

The woman opened the door wider, so that both her eyes appeared. Jonathan knew the two of them were not exactly an impressive sight. His sweat had made his shirt cling to his chest. Emili was still in a pair of blackened gray slacks, her silk blouse stained from the fire beneath the metro station in Rome.

“Come in,” the woman said.

She led them down a long hallway with unpainted walls and chipped mahogany wainscoting. A corkboard displayed service schedules alongside a tacked-up postcard of a Raphael from the Vatican Museums.

They followed her into the convent’s large lecture room, where she explained that the convent welcomed church groups from all over the world to view the
lithostrotos
in the basement.

“Pavement?” Jonathan said, translating the Greek. “They come from all over the world to see
pavement
?”

The sister smiled. “The
lithostrotos
beneath the convent are said to be the original first-century stones where Pontius Pilate held his infamous trial of Jesus. It has always been a place of quiet reflection.” She looked away. “Until now.”

“You have heard noises while down there?” Emili asked.

“For months,” the sister said wearily. She managed to find their eyes briefly as she spoke.

“What sorts of noises?” she said.

“They sound like high-powered drills, and engines of large construction equipment.”

“Construction equipment?”

“I raised the issue with Rome immediately,” the sister said. “I received a letter in return, saying the land that surrounds this church belongs to the Muslim religious authority. I wrote back, suggesting the underground caverns adjacent to this monastery are beneath the Temple Mount, that it is the duty of all religions to protect it. I was told never to speak of the matter again.” A mournful silence fell over her. “But I have never heard the drilling louder than . . .” She fell silent again, unsure how much to disclose.

“Louder than when, Sister?” Emili said.

The sister leaned in—“than last night.”

A
hmed Hassan walked through the spice market’s riot of noise and color, watching the vendors unload heavy sacks of black cumin, coriander, fennel, and curry from wheelbarrows. In the market’s last booth, the vendor nodded as Ahmed approached, permitting him to inspect a sack of turmeric. Ahmed bent over and reached into the mounds of its bright ocher powder. He appeared to be testing the consistency of the spice, but inside the powder he felt three tubes containing red phosphorus mixed with nitrocellulose, a weapons-grade explosive. Ahmed tied and lifted the bag, his scrawny frame straining under the burlap sack’s weight on his shoulder. The nitrocellulose did not increase the weight of the burlap sack substantially, although its explosive power was equal to that of two hundred pounds of TNT. Ahmed moved through the maze of Jerusalem’s streets, past the Via Dolorosa, with its rows of shuttered Christian souvenir shops, and down Bab el-Hadid until he reached a small shawarma stand in the heart of the Muslim Quarter.

“We have been waiting for those spices!” said an old man, who sliced up a lamb outside his half-shuttered shop. He spoke loudly for the benefit of the Israeli surveillance that dotted the Muslim Quarter. Ahmed slipped into the shop and placed the sack of spices behind the counter, carefully removing the three vials of nitrocellulose. He opened a steel hatch in the shop’s floor and the smell of animal carcasses wafted out with a dizzying force.

Ahmed climbed down through the hole into a stone-cooled grotto with skinned goat carcasses hanging from hooks on the wall. He immediately spotted the plastic bag, which contained the clothing Salah ad-Din had prepared for him.

Ahmed took off his madras and over his scrawny naked frame he carefully buttoned the white, Western-style shirt he removed from the bag. Next he put on tzitzit, the woolen fringes worn by Orthodox Jews, wrinkled black pants, and a black suit jacket, then clapped on a black velvet skullcap and above it an oversized, wide-brimmed black hat. Finally, he removed a stolen Hebrew prayer book, a
siddur
, from the bag, opened it, and neatly placed the vials of nitrocellulose where the pages had been cut out. Knowing the fragility of its explosive contents, Ahmed gently tucked the
siddur
in the inside jacket pocket of his suit and headed back up the stairs.

As he left the shawarma shop and walked down Bab el-Quattan, two Israeli soldiers waved him through an initial security checkpoint toward the Western Wall plaza. Ahmed’s disguise as a thin-bearded Sephardic yeshiva student was so convincing that neither guard asked him a single question.

I
n the convent, Jonathan and Emili followed the sister into the chapel. They walked up to the altar and then behind it, where a thin steel chain hung between two short metal posts at the top of a spiral staircase. The sister unclipped the chain and led them down into the darkness.