The Last Ember (5 page)

“But it may be,” Jonathan said. “The Latin inscription on the underside of the fragment.”

“A monument revealed to Josephus,” Mildren said. “You’re the one who translated it.”

“Not
to
Josephus, but
by
Josephus. The Latin would be spelled the same way in both cases. This hidden inscription might have been carved
by
Josephus himself.”

“Let’s just hope your legal arguments are more consistent. Why would Josephus have to leave secret messages? You said an hour ago that he was Titus’s chum, and every researcher agrees with that.”

“Not
every researcher
,” Jonathan said, his tone gathering conviction. “At the academy I researched the possibility that Josephus was not a traitor to Jerusalem, but surrendered to the Romans to become a—”

“Spy?” Mildren cut him off.

“Yes,” Jonathan nodded. “A spy from Jerusalem planted in the Roman court.”

Mildren rose from his desk. “Let me give you some advice, Marcus. I’ll keep it simple. No hidden messages here, nothing backward, inside out, upside down, okay? Here it is: This conversation never happened.”

“Which conversation?”

“This one, the one we’re having right now. You were never in my office, and you most certainly did not discover any Bible code-type messages under the artifacts on trial. No rays of light. Am I understood?”

“We should at least notify Tatton. He said no surprises at trial.” Jonathan pointed at the crumpled napkin. “
That
is a surprise.”

“No,
that
is a napkin,” Mildren said. “And whatever you’ve scribbled on it,
that
is your imagination. Only surprise here would be if anyone at the Italian Cultural Ministry were to notice.”

“They would need only a flashlight,” Jonathan said.

“A flashlight,” Mildren said, his voice revealing how much stress he was under.

“That’s right.”

“A flashlight will help them detect the grammatical irregularity of the Latin verb, a flashlight will help them read these imperceptible cracks like a cereal box decoder ring? Is that what a flashlight will help them do? Because I think you are greatly overestimating those bureaucrats at the Italian Cultural Ministry, not to mention
underestimating
your capacity to make their case for them!” He paused, wiping his receding hairline. “For God’s sake, man.” His tone broke and Jonathan could see how much Mildren had riding on this case. “Know when to stop
digging
. You’re not a damn graduate student anymore.”

“Our case is vulnerable here,” Jonathan said, picking up the napkin. “That’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. If the prosecution finds out—”

“Then don’t repeat this to another soul,” Mildren said, reshuffling some papers on his desk. “Unless you can prove those cracks are meaningless graffiti—a bored monk, a medieval prankster—or just a coincidence. Enough monkeys at a typewriter and one of them will write
Hamlet
, that kind of thing.”

“But what if the truth—”

“The truth is not your client!” Mildren yelled. “The backbone of our case is that there is nothing unusual about these artifacts, remember?” Mildren pointed at the napkin in Jonathan’s hand. “And you come to me with
this
!” His eyes would not have been wider had Jonathan brought something radioactive into his office. “I mean, what do you really think you’ve stumbled across here?” Exhaustion replaced the anger in his voice. “Some kind of ancient truth that only you can salvage? You’re not Ben-Hur, Jon. You’re a lawyer.”

Mildren stood up and walked Jonathan to the door. “I’ll tell Tatton he can reach you back at the hotel. You don’t need to do any more research. What you need is sleep.”

It was nearly dawn by the time Jonathan arrived at the Hotel Exedra. He walked across its white palatial lobby, staring through sections of the Lucite floor that displayed the ruins of late Roman baths, or
exedra
, still beneath the designer hotel. Jonathan entered his suite to find his briefcase delivered and his one extra suit pressed and hanging in the bedroom closet. The suite’s veranda continued the ancient bath theme, and steam rolled off the vanishing edge of a private outdoor heated pool.

Jonathan stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the veranda overlooking Rome. He smelled the poplars of the piazza below mix with the street salt and wet cobblestone. The scent of winter in Rome. Street vendors were already setting up their stalls for the day’s fruit market. A streak of orange pastel sliced the ash-dark sky.

In four hours the firm’s sedan would return to pick him up for the hearing. He needed to finish the memo and get some rest. He needed to put the past behind him, to forgive himself for his mistake seven years earlier. But memories kept resurfacing: of sneaking beneath an eighteenth-century Roman villa into the catacombs below, of the sudden collapse of the tomb walls, of watching an academy fellow disappear in a gray cloud of earth. And it was his fault. All of it. The academy’s disciplinary committee rescinded Jonathan’s Rome Prize and threw him out. Exiled like Philoctetes by the Greeks, Jonathan soon discovered that news of the tragedy had spread through the closed world of university classics departments. A faculty position at Columbia was now out of the question. Even community colleges wouldn’t offer him a job. Within two months, Jonathan went from being a Rome Prize fellow to tagging amphorae in the storeroom of So theby’s back in New York to make rent.

He stepped back into the suite and picked up the half-finished memo from where he had left it on the coffee table. He settled into the couch and kept the glass door to the balcony open, hoping the cold air would keep him awake as he reviewed the file. But within minutes he was asleep, the briefs resting on his chest, the breeze rousing nothing but a sweeping sash of curtain.

B
eneath the Dome of the Rock’s Foundation Stone, Salah ad-Din and Professor Cianari crouched inside a cavern that had the quality of a forgotten crypt beneath a cathedral altar. Overhead, the underside of the bedrock roofed the cavern in a low, gentle curve. The air was damp with a faint smell of mildewing prayer carpets. Through the hole above, Salah ad-Din heard two imams from the Waqf Authority noisily opening the shrine’s doors to make their security rounds.

Right on schedule,
Salah ad-Din thought, glancing at his chronograph’s green digital glow.

Salah ad-Din had instructed Professor Cianari to remain nearly motionless, knowing that any noise beneath the stone would echo through the Dome. Only Salah ad-Din’s fingers moved, turning the worn pages of a small leather book he consulted with the same care someone would a religious text. He had never shown the professor the contents of the book and the front cover bore only a single calligraphed Arabic word,
for which the professor’s careful, scholarly translation left him only puzzled further. The word meant “a dwindling flame” or, more precisely, “an ember.” The professor knew better than to inquire.

“The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini led the Waqf for years on this Mount,” Salah ad-Din whispered, “and yet the imams have forsaken his research.”

The professor knew the regard Salah ad-Din held for the book’s mysterious research, so he refrained from telling him that its author, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of the Jerusalem Waqf in the 1930s, used his close friendship with Adolf Hitler to pillage archives throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to research his eccentric archaeological theories. From what the professor could see, the book’s illustrations appeared scattered and unprofessional, but on every page burned the obsessive focus for which the grand mufti was notorious.

“One hour until
fajr
, Sheikh,” Ahmed said. He had rappelled down swiftly behind the professor and now unloaded a green cloth army bag from his shoulder. Though barely a teenager, Ahmed Hassan possessed a talent with explosives that surpassed the abilities of any professional bomb maker in Gaza.

“There must be a tunnel beneath this floor,” Salah ad-Din said to Professor Cianari. “During the Roman siege, the high priest escaped through an underground channel that was used to drain the blood from the Temple altar.” Salah ad-Din turned abruptly to Professor Cianari. “What were the altar’s measurements above the stone?”

The professor checked his notes. “The altar was five
tephachim
high,” he said, using the biblical measurement. “That corresponds to five hands-breadths above the stone.”

Salah ad-Din walked across the floor, counting his paces until he found a seam in the stone.

“Here,” Salah ad-Din gestured to Ahmed. “The tunnel begins here.”

Ahmed removed an aerosol can of nitromethane-based foam from the bag.

“No,” Salah ad-Din said. “The imams will hear the blast.”

Ahmed’s quick, intelligent eyes registered. He assembled a narrow barreled machine with six long pipes bound together.

“What is that?” the professor asked.

“A pressurized helium piston,” Salah ad-Din said. “A single blast blows loose a square foot of concrete.”

A silent jackhammer,
the professor thought. He should not have been surprised, considering Salah ad-Din’s other gadgetry: satellite phones, acoustic ranging devices to create digital maps of underground passages, not to mention helicopter transport. But far more imposing than his resources was his intelligence. Professor Cianari had heard the young man speak without an accent in half a dozen languages, not even including his countless dialects of Arabic. He translated obscure Greek and Latin texts without assistance and could recite them from memory, having seen them just once.

Ahmed lifted the machine to his shoulder, targeting its nozzle to the floor. Unlike the sound of a jackhammer, the blast was singular, an air gun’s release—
phht
—followed by the crack of broken marble. The stone floor was instantly eggshelled and with the single tap of Salah ad-Din’s foot the stone shattered inward. Strangely, the fragments made no sound as they fell into what seemed a bottomless cavern below.
It’s hollow beneath the floor.
A dank wind breezed upward from the opening like the breath of a living being.

Salah ad-Din shined his flashlight into the opening. Carved stone stairs descended to a platform.

Salah ad-Din climbed through the hole, and the professor followed. They reached a narrow stone bridge that seemed to hover above a vast black cavern.

For Salah ad-Din, it was only fitting that as he neared the end of the text’s research, this humid subterranean chamber would remind him of its beginning: the dark cinder-block basement of his childhood home in Beirut, where—against his mother’s wishes—his grandfather first showed him the moldy parchments from which he translated ancient Greek into Arabic for the young boy.

He read to his grandson the battle scenes of the Roman siege of the Temple Mount, bringing the first century alive in the squalor of their basement. He painted the scene of Jerusalem under siege in A.D. 70: thousands of Roman legionnaires, spearmen, and smoking fires and wooden catapults all pitched around Jerusalem’s city walls. Salah ad-Din remembered his grandfather’s crooked finger stabbing a thick vellum manuscript folio of Flavius Josephus.
The Roman general, Titus, did not conquer Jerusalem for political reasons,
he reminded him after every reading.
He conquered Jerusalem because he was afraid. His magicians said there was a power inside Jerusalem’s Temple stronger than he, one he had to defeat.
Once, Salah ad-Din had fallen asleep on his grandfather’s lap and awakened to find his grandfather not reading, but sadly shaking his head. “Titus’s mistake,” the old man said, running his hands over the page. Only years later did Salah ad-Din understand that his grandfather’s remorse was not for the Roman emperor’s failure, but for his own.

After his grandfather died, Salah ad-Din often revisited the mildewed cardboard boxes, piecing together the old man’s incoherent narratives, both ancient and modern. Yellowed newspaper photographs struck the now teenaged Salah ad-Din with the exhilaration of learning the truth of a fairy tale: clippings of his grandfather with high-ranking German officers in Berchtesgaden, an Italian front-page photograph with Mussolini grandly showing his grandfather a Roman ruin. “Famous,” he remembered his grandfather wheezing as he pointed to the caption of his youthful photograph: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Salah ad-Din slowly learned why his mother had moved them from Cairo to Damascus, Baghdad, and now Beirut. Her father had been convicted by a Yugoslavian military tribunal for war crimes for recruiting nearly twenty thousand Muslims to the SS. His grandfather’s scribbled notes revealed that agents from the Israeli secret service were looking for him. Most of the writing was incoherent, and it was difficult to distinguish between actual news and the recollection of a disjointed nightmare.

But at the bottom of the last cardboard box, beneath pages of scribbled notes, lay a small leather-bound notebook jammed with quotes from Josephus and directions to various locations, such as the attic of a Parisian mosque and a storage room in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum. Each location returned Salah ad-Din to a different story his grandfather had recounted, ranting with his back hunched against the basement’s cinder block, pulling at a scraggly white beard thin as torn cotton.
The research was seeking an artifact,
Salah ad-Din came to realize.
Something not even the Greek or Roman military could capture.
Salah ad-Din blamed himself for not believing him then. The small book proved everything his grandfather had told him. It was the cipher to his soul.