The Last Ember (15 page)

“‘Kodosh Arbor Ohr,’”
he read aloud, using the rudimentary Hebrew vocabulary learned from his work with ancient texts. “
Kodosh
means ‘sacred.’ ”

“
Arbor
, of course, is ‘tree,’ ” Emili said, translating the Latin.

“And
ohr
, the second Hebrew word, means ‘light.’ ”

“A sacred tree of light,” Emili said.

“It’s cultic imagery. Trees were pagan references. Why would someone pay homage to a pagan image in Hebraic script? The war prisoners from Jerusalem were monotheistic, not pagan.”

Jonathan moved his finger across the second line of inscription. “
Domus aurea
means ‘golden house.’ ”

“As in Nero’s Golden Palace here in Rome?” Emili said. From her preservation work on the Oppian Hill, Emili had worked extensively in Nero’s sprawling golden palace. She often quoted the ancient architect Fabilius, who had called the structure “greedy for the impossible.” The Roman populace despised the palace’s excesses, forcing subsequent emperors to build over the palace within five years of Nero’s death, which inadvertently preserved it until its rediscovery in the Renaissance.

Jonathan noticed carvings of birds surrounding the inscription of the words
domus aurea
.

“Those are owls,” Jonathan said. “Wherever this inscription refers to, it must be a place to protect something, like a vault of some kind.”

“And you get that from a couple of owls?” Emili said.

“In the ancient world, owls symbolized protection. Our idea of owls as wise comes from an ancient association with an owl’s ability to see danger from afar. Roman armies used owls as a symbol on their armaments. Ancient Greece stamped owls on their money. Although it’s another pagan insignia at odds with these prisoners’ dedication to Jerusalem, the idea here of protecting something is unmistakable.”

Emili reached into her satchel and removed a thin, black digital camera, only slightly larger than a credit card.

“Is this a picture point?” Jonathan asked, teasing.

Emili held the device a few feet from the wall and snapped a picture.

“I’m documenting these illegal excavations.”

She crossed to the other side of the room and was photographing the other walls when she noticed a carpet of steam rolling out of a low arch on the far wall of the room. Jonathan walked over and crouched beside her. Both of them noted the rank bacterial scent of the steam.

“Must be a sewage leak through there,” Jonathan said, pointing through the archway.

“No,” Emili said. “It’s a mix of methane and sulfur that gathers in Roman ruins when pollutants sink into the soil. We call it dragon breath.”

“Pleasant,” Jonathan said.

“There is one other issue,” Emili said. “The methane is highly combustible. In tight passageways, even a spark can ignite the air. There’s little oxygen, so the explosion lasts only a second or two, but long enough to kill every rodent or human around.”

Emili stepped through the arch and waded through a low carpet of steam. She swept her flashlight’s beam side to side until she found the source of the steam. A large shattered pipe lay misaligned on the floor, exhaling a hot vapor like smoke around a fat cigar.

“The steam pipe cracked,” Jonathan said over its hiss.

“Not by itself,” Emili said, and pointed at a gash in the pipe where its steel skin was peeled back like a tin can. In the middle of the corridor, the steam heated the methane, creating a bluish flame that hovered a few inches above the tunnel floor.

Emili began to cough. “The methane is mixing with the steam,” she said, hands on her knees. “Jon, this corridor is going to explode.”

B
eneath the Colosseum, Profeta, Rufio, and Brandisi faced a choice: Three
fornici,
or passages, led in separate directions into the darkness.

Rufio stood beside Profeta, his every breath tightening as his anxiety grew. He saw no explosives inside the corridor—yet.

“Perhaps we should turn around,” he suggested.

“The noise came from one of these passageways,” Profeta said. “Each of us will take one. If you hear anything, radio it in immediately.”

“I’ll take this one,” Rufio said, pointing at the corridor leading toward the arena.

“Okay, Brandisi, take the middle. I’ll take the far left.” They separated, moving slowly down different corridors, guns drawn.

Now alone, Rufio leaned against the wall, no longer disguising the need to catch his breath. The magnitude of these excavations enraged him, not because of their destruction, but because they would certainly trigger a departmental investigation. Over the last week, he had gone to great lengths to conceal their excavation, once even intercepting a merchant’s complaint to the tourist bureau that one of Salah ad-Din’s work trucks was obstructing his café from the Colosseum’s tourist line. He should have known these men would betray him.
At least the illicit excavators south of Naples honored their deals with the carabinieri,
he thought, scanning the tunnel walls for explosives. As the corridor narrowed, his smoker’s lungs worked harder for air. Like a scuba diver with little oxygen remaining and yet compelled to descend deeper, Rufio moved forward, feeling the darkness thicken around him.

He saw a flashlight strobe the wall.

Rufio switched off the safety trigger guard of his nine-millimeter Glock. He knew that killing the first
tombarolo
in his path would raise him above suspicion in any departmental investigation. He brought his elbows to eye level to steady his aim.

 

 

 

Jonathan and Emili hurriedly backtracked around the corridors’ tight turns. A dark stretch of tunnel opened up and they ran. The sound of a tour group above filtered down from the tourist deck. “The tourists,” Emili said, horrified. “We’ve got to evacuate the Colosseum.”

“Ferma!”
Rufio screamed.
Freeze!
He was standing thirty feet behind them.

Jonathan and Emili scraped to a stop and ducked into a niche, their backs flat against the stone. The man was only yards away, his trembling beam of light growing larger as he approached.

“Chi diavolo sei?”
Rufio yelled. Who the hell are you? Jonathan and Emili could see the man inspecting each niche with his flashlight.

“That’s the staircase I came down,” Emili whispered, pointing across the corridor.

Emili moved silently into the darkness and made it to the stairwell. Jonathan began to follow when Rufio illuminated the corridor. He darted back into the niche, and was now separated from Emili by the corridor’s thick cloud of dust floating in the beam of Rufio’s flashlight.

“Go!” Jonathan whispered to the other side. “I will meet you up there!”

Emili shook her head. “But how will you—”

“Just go!” Jonathan said. Emili disappeared up the steps into the darkness.

Rufio swung his flashlight side to side across the corridor, and Jonathan could now make out the man as he moved down the hallway, the red sash trim of his blue uniform pants, the white leather holster of his gun, and his officer’s visor cap worn low.
A carabinieri officer,
Jonathan thought, relieved.

“Agente,”
Jonathan said in Italian, stepping into the corridor.

“Chi sei tu!”
Rufio yelled. He wheeled his flashlight toward Jonathan and, in his other hand, aimed his pistol at point-blank range. In the backlight of the harsh beam Jonathan could see in Rufio’s bloodshot eyes an animal-like fury, a man no longer in control. His gun bobbled so wildly Jonathan thought it might go off by accident.

“I can explain,” Jonathan said quietly in Italian, raising his hands. He motioned toward faint daylight of the stairwell. “But it’s not safe down here.”

“This was not part of our deal,” Rufio yelled, waving his gun in the air. “None of this was!”

Jonathan stood frozen in the gray spill light of the storm drain above him, feeling its draft of fresh air. He kept his arms half up, elbows bent.
Deal? What deal?
Jonathan noticed the man shook uncontrollably.

“I don’t know what you’re—” Jonathan said.

“Get on your knees!”
Rufio straightened his arm, holding the gun.

Jonathan lowered himself, dropping one knee and then the other. “There isn’t time,” Jonathan said.

“They discovered the warehouse!” Rufio screamed. “Tell Salah ad-Din it’s over.”

“Warehouse?” Jonathan said, sensing a fury in the cop that was more personal than professional. “You have me mistaken for—”

But Rufio’s foot interrupted Jonathan, crushing into his stomach. Jonathan doubled over and Rufio bent down, taunting him. “Where I come from in Sicily, there are
rules
,” Rufio said, landing another kick into the small of Jonathan’s back. Jonathan fell over, for a moment wondering if the blow had cracked his spine. He struggled to his knees. “But Salah ad-Din plays by his own rules, doesn’t he?” The officer punctuated the question with a swift stroke to Jonathan’s rib cage that was so hard it actually lifted him an inch off the ground. Rufio grabbed Jonathan’s hair, nestling the shaft of his gun under his jaw. “Well, I have rules, too,” Rufio said. “And you tell him this isn’t Jerusalem; this is
Rome
.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jonathan wheezed. “Or who . . . Salah ad-Din—”

“Stop,”
Rufio yelled,
“lying!”
and yanked Jonathan’s head further back.

“I came from”—Jonathan gasped for air—“the tourist decks.”

As though trying to make sense of the last of that statement, Rufio blinked rapidly, realizing he had confessed to a random man. In the gray light, Jonathan saw that Rufio’s hands grew even more tremulous.

The two-way function of Rufio’s mobile phone began to crackle, picking up reception from the street grate above them. An officer’s frantic voice came through, but was too choppy to make out. Rufio dragged Jonathan to his feet, not removing the gun from his neck, and walked him under the grate. “Alessandro!” Rufio’s two-way radio blared to life with Brandisi’s panicked tone. “Get out of there! The bomb squad said the tunnel is filled with methane!”

Rufio grabbed the radio, but dropped his flashlight, its beam rolling on the dirt like a distant headlight. He lowered his gun, crouching to pick up the light. Jonathan seized the opportunity and bolted into the darkness. Almost instantly, he felt the force of the officer’s clumsy tackle from behind. Both men hit the ground, rolling. Jonathan slammed Rufio’s arm against the dirt-packed floor and his pistol fell out of his hand. Jonathan swiped it into the darkness.

Rufio reached for a small Taser gun on his belt. A blue filament of light flashed, but Jonathan pushed it downward into Rufio’s shirt. The officer’s torso convulsed, his chest flying upward in the strained arc of defibrillation. His tight grip on Jonathan’s shirt faded as he collapsed, suddenly limp, arms splayed on the floor.

Jonathan stumbled up to his feet and ran through the corridor, feeling a stinging pain in his left hand. He noticed that he had cut himself across his knuckles, but he did not remember how.

In the corridor, Rufio made it to his knees, driving his palms into his eye sockets from the headache after the Taser’s shock.

Jonathan dashed into the open-air maze of service passages that once supported the arena floor. From this part of the Colosseum’s basement, he could see the sun flashing through the tight brick passages. Jonathan stared upward, trying to find a way out. He could hear the clicking of the exit turnstiles above him, a tour being given in Russian. A child having a tantrum. Never had Jonathan craved the twenty-first century more.

Ahead of him, Jonathan saw a multilevel scaffolding that supported a partial reconstruction of the arena floor. He heaved himself upward to scale it, his hands gripping its metal pipes one after the other. Steep aluminum stairs connected the transoms of the scaffold, and Jonathan sprinted up them toward the tourist decks. A breeze of fresh air off the Palatine Hill confirmed that he was finally aboveground. He emerged in the center of the arena, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the sky’s bright gauzy overcast. He walked along the highest plank of the scaffolding toward the arena’s low railing, where a tourist group stood on the other side, fortunately with their backs to him. Jonathan stood for a moment to catch his breath.

Suddenly, a hand reached up from below and grabbed his ankle, then yanked him downward with such force that Jonathan hit the scaffold’s wooden plank, stomach first. He shook his whole body to free his leg, struggling to stay on the plank with one knee. It was an unrelenting force, like Hades himself pulling Jonathan back into the underworld.

Jonathan looked down, and he saw a carabiniere uniform covered in dirt, a face contorted in pain, eyes still blood-red from the tunnel’s fumes. Rufio had chased Jonathan up the scaffolding.

“Fermati ades—”
Rufio began, but did not finish.

The muffled noise of a distant cannon blasted somewhere below. Its rumble grew louder as the reverberation took on a physical force, violently shaking the metal piping of the scaffold. The sound ripened into a deafening blast as one of the arches beneath the arena spit a wide tongue of fire that quickly extinguished itself in a geyser of smoke.

The gift shop’s glass wall shattered, ending the crowd’s terrified silence like a starting pistol.
“Irt!”
a German guide shrieked.
Earthquake!
Families that moments before had obediently moved around the arena circumference now clawed each other out of the way. Parents carried bawling children under both arms as they stampeded toward the turnstiles.

Jonathan saw that Rufio had lost his grip and fallen backward onto a lower wooden plank of the scaffold, where he lay unconscious in the smoke. Instinctively, Jonathan climbed back down the piping, lifted Rufio’s arm over his shoulder, and walked him up the steep flight of stairs to the top planks. Jonathan folded Rufio over the arena railing like a rag, the officer’s arms dangling in front, and then swung his own legs over and climbed onto the modern herringbone brick of the tourist deck.