The Last Ember (4 page)

“Like a different life, sir.”

“Perfect.” Tatton flashed a smile, but it was one Jonathan could not quite decipher.
“Roma, non basta una vita,”
Tatton said. For Rome, one lifetime is not enough.

C
omandante Profeta stepped back from the corpse in the abandoned warehouse, taking in the high-technology equipment of the operation. Flat plasma screens were strewn across the floor, their polymer liners bashed in. Computer server towers lay on their side, one with a fresh bullet hole through the CD drive.

“Old manuscript pages over here!” called out Lieutenant Brandisi. “Dozens of them,
Comandante
!”

Profeta crossed the room to find a pile of loose parchments on the floor. They looked centuries old. He picked up one of the pages from the pile and then another.

“Flavius Josephus,” Profeta said.

“Who?”

“The first-century historian who chronicled the Roman siege of Jerusalem,” Profeta answered, pointing at an illustrated title folio page. “These parchments were torn from Renaissance manuscripts of Flavius Josephus. Someone here was smuggling—”

Profeta stopped suddenly.

“Comandante?”
Lieutenant Brandisi said.

“Queste sono pagine che scottano,”
Profeta said. These pages are hot.

“As in stolen?” Brandisi asked.

“No, their temperature,” Profeta said, putting his palm to the center of the parchment. The area was so darkened and brittle it might have caught flame. “There’s a heat source in the pile,” Profeta said, alarm rising in his voice.

Profeta’s concern caught the attention of every officer in the room. Throughout his long career, the
comandante
displayed an eerie intuition during his raids to recover stolen antiquities. In a recent documentary,
Fugitive Masterpieces
, Profeta’s team had given up searching a fish-packing plant when, to the documentarian’s delight, Profeta stabbed one of the fish with a pen, revealing a shipment of glistening Byzantine glass smuggled in the bellies of frozen carp. The episode’s title was a play on Profeta’s insight and his surname: Il Profeta, the Prophet. His gray beard reinforced the image of Old Testament wisdom, but “the Prophet” was a nickname Profeta never used and never liked. Whether it was superstition or a fear of blasphemy that made him bristle at the nickname was unclear. “No one is a prophet in his own lifetime,” Profeta often said. The illicit antiquities trade was growing dangerous enough without tempting fate.

Profeta knelt in the pile. He felt the heat intensify as he sifted through the parchments. He dug more rapidly, sweeping the pages to the side until he uncovered the orange, luminescent coils of an old space heater housed in a dented steel box.

“A heater!” Lieutenant Brandisi said, relieved. “They left a space heater on.”

Profeta examined the device. It was old and low-grade with a rusted grate and no thermostat. Beneath the heater, two tubes filled with clear liquid were duct-taped to the basement floor. A dark trail of liquid led to the walls, which glistened as with condensation. Small curls of smoke wisped off the floor closest to the heater.

Profeta leaned closer to the substance and bristled at its sharp, acidic scent.

“Everyone out of the room,” he said evenly. He recognized the peroxide-based explosive, triacetone triperoxide, a gelatinous substance that he knew was responsible for new airline regulations prohibiting liquids in excess of three ounces. A few hundred grams of the gel could produce hundreds of liters of gas in a fraction of a second. The walls were coated with it.

“But the body—” Brandisi said.

“Go,” Profeta interrupted, straining to keep his voice calm. “These walls are coated with explosives.”

The officers scrambled out of the warehouse. Making sure he was the last one out, Profeta looked back and saw the column.

He ran back toward the column and plunged his hand into the thick yellow liquid. He worked to lift the puttylike flesh of the corpse’s hand above the surface and pressed her fingers on the back of a manuscript page, making five ocher-colored fingerprints. A thick lock of her hair was floating freely, and Profeta grabbed it. He raced through the warehouse’s darkness and out the door, dodging through the dock’s obstacle course of barnacled propellers and rotted wooden dinghies. Twenty years before, his kneecap had been shattered by a tomb robber’s shovel, and his sprint still resembled an awkward sideways gallop.

Profeta saw his team racing in front of him toward six unmarked carabinieri cars that secured the perimeter of the dock. The cars were decrepit on the outside, but beneath their weathered frames, they were outfitted with bullet-repellent windows, Kevlar-coated tires, and a modified Italian engine designed to outrun even the newest German commercial roadsters. The officers inside them were completely unaware of the imminent explosion.

He hoped they were parked far enough away.

The waves of an incoming storm jostled the tugboats noisily against the docks, their oversized tire bumpers squeaking against the wood pil ings. The noise made his own shouts inaudible.

“Get back!” he screamed, flailing his arms above his head. “Get—”

The dock beneath him shuddered, and Profeta dove over a low concrete street blockade as a blast of ovenlike heat pressed him against the dock’s damp wood. The windows of the moored tugboats shattered. Bricks rained on the police cars like cannon shot. A small rusted propeller impaled a plank inches from Profeta’s arm.

After a moment, Profeta lifted his head; gray ash clouds billowed out of the warehouse as rain sizzled on the dock’s charred wood planks. Dizzy from the smoke and unable to hear a sound, Profeta saw the red beacon lights of a cruise ship pull into a distant pier. A few feet in front of him lay a dead egret, blackened from the explosion. He willed himself to stay conscious, although he drifted, seeing the egrets of his youth, flying over the sun-bleached docks of Salerno. Slowly his hearing returned and he did not welcome the intrusion. The inevitable chaos of shouting officers and screeching tires surrounded him.

J
onathan sat alone in the firm’s conference room. He put down the legal file and stood up to stretch his legs, walking toward the two ancient fragments inside their glass case.

“Emili,” Jonathan said softly. “What did you get yourself into?”

Jonathan carefully inspected the inscription along the fragments’ bottom. TROPAEUM JOSEPHO ILLUMINA. Other than the peculiar Latin, nothing was out of the ordinary. If the word
illumina
was the full word, it was mistakenly conjugated in the Latin imperative, but it wouldn’t be the last time that street graffiti would be grammatically incorrect.

Tatton’s voice echoed in his mind.
Mysteries of the ancient world do not concern us here.

Jonathan grabbed his coat, stood up from the table, and walked to the panel of light dimmers beside the door.

Get some sleep, Jon,
he thought, scaling down the lights. The conference room was dark, except for a low halogen light hanging above the display case. The beam of light spread over the stone map making its gray marble, nearly white where the ray was strongest. The light then spilled onto the floor through the glass bottom of the case, except for directly beneath the fragment, where a large shadow traced the contours of the stone.

Something caught Jonathan’s eye, and he crouched beside the case, inspecting not the fragments but the shadow beneath them. In the midst of the shadow, some of the halogen’s light appeared to break through to the floor, casting various lines. Jonathan stood up, and looking at the top of the map noticed that the concentric curves depicting the Colosseum allowed light to pass through the entire half-foot of marble to the floor.

Jonathan ducked again. The light illuminated vaguely formed Latin letters inside the stone’s shadow as though through a small projector.

He suddenly felt a long-dormant scholarly exhilaration, like what he had experienced during his graduate school days when after weeks of research a tattered papyrus became legible.

Jonathan now understood the words of the inscription,
Tropaeum illumina.
The imperative form. A command to “light
,”
as in “to shine light on the stone.” The grammar on the underside of the fragment was not an accident. It was an instruction.
Shine light on the stone.

He pushed the display case, wheeling it a few inches until it rested directly beneath the ceiling’s halogen light. With astonishing clarity, the light projected an uneven row of Latin letters illuminated against the stone’s shadow.

“Titus’s mistake,” Jonathan translated. He grabbed a pen and scribbled on an Alitalia napkin from his jacket pocket. “A steganographic message,” Jonathan said, referring to the ancient art of invisible writing.

He backed out of the room and hurried down a corridor lined with museum-quality Piranesi engravings. Jonathan could hear Mildren’s voice on a phone call and saw that one of the office doors was ajar. He knocked on the door and pushed it open. Mildren sat at his desk, speaking into a wireless headset. It was nearly two a.m. and Jonathan guessed it was the New York office on the other end, six hours behind European time.
Does this guy ever sleep?
Jonathan thought, waiting in the threshold.

“I’ll ring you back,” Mildren said, removing the small headset from his ear. “Yes?”

“Have we had an expert look at those fragments?” Jonathan asked.

“You’re the expert,” Mildren replied, leaning back in his office chair, arms crossed on his chest. “No others. Client’s instructions.”

“Because I think there is some kind of . . .” Jonathan paused. “Some kind of message engraved inside the stone.” He pointed toward the corridor. “I can show you if you’d—”

“Inside the stone,” Mildren said flatly. “A message inside the stone.”

“Carved inside, yes,” Jonathan said, handing Mildren the crumpled napkin where he drew a messy three-dimensional image of the marble fragment. “The top of the fragment depicts a location in Rome, just like other fragments of the Forma Urbis. But the carving of the Colosseum’s arena is deeper than it appears, allowing light to pass through the marble. On the reverse side someone chiseled cracks, which look natural, but really they filter light in the shape of letters. The halogen’s beam above the glass case projected onto the floor the words
Error Titi,
‘Titus’s mistake.’”

“Titus’s mistake?” Mildren sat upright. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I think it’s a historical reference to a Roman emperor. According to ancient historians, Emperor Titus supposedly said on his deathbed: ‘I have made one mistake.’ ”

“What bloody mistake?” Mildren asked, losing his patience.

“One of the great unanswered questions of the ancient world,” Jonathan said with a shrug. “Before he was emperor, Titus led the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Some historians say the mistake refers to his entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple, where no mortal was permitted.”

“Sounds a bit paranoid, no?”

“It would have, except when Titus later ascended the throne, an entire bustling Roman city was swallowed in ash.”

“You mean Pompeii?”

“Right, and Titus’s magicians told him it was the vengeance of the God of Israel to choose Pompeii, a city named for the only other Roman emperor to enter the Temple’s inner sanctum in Jerusalem.”

“The only mistake I see here, Marcus, is that you’re spending billable hours on this. Whatever you saw was just coincidence, a reflection, or maybe—”

“A message intended to escape the Roman censors,” Jonathan interrupted. “It could be ancient steganography at its finest.”

“Stenography? What’s a court reporter got to do with this?”

“That’s
steno
graphy, from the Greek
steno
, narrow, and
grapho
, writing, meaning ‘shorthand.’ Steganography is different. It’s an ancient form of encryption. Letters buried under blank wax, or smuggled inside the belly of a hare.
Steganos
means a concealed note, as in hidden writing. A steganographic message isn’t simply encrypted, you don’t even know it’s there.”

“Concealed writing, right.” Mildren’s tone was even, as though to draw Jonathan out further. “An encrypted message.”

“Except that encryption gives you privacy, but someone still knows you’re sending a message, like Caesar sending encoded letters to his generals or the Internet scattering your credit card number until it reaches the vendor. Steganography offers not only privacy, but secrecy, obscuring that you have sent any message at all. Whether it’s a nineteenth-century British spy disguising enemy artillery positions in butterfly-wing drawings or a twenty-first-century Iraqi insurgent embedding an MP3 file within written text, the technique is the same. Ancient espionage differed only by method.”

“Ancient espionage,” Mildren repeated in a monotone.

“I know it sounds a little crazy—”

“A
little
crazy!” Mildren’s voice escalated to a shout. “We are in the middle of a hearing and you’re dreaming up some kind of ancient spy plot! I mean, Jon, you’re talking about ancient Rome here, not the Cold War.”

“Hundreds of years before Rome, Herodotus described the Greeks’ tattooing secret messages on the scalp beneath the hair of slaves. They wrote invisibly with urine, wax, and cipher codes to hide—”

“The only thing hidden, Marcus, is your point.”

“My point is that if the prosecution sees this message, it could support Emili’s—Dr. Travia’s allegations. It might explain why these fragments were stolen and researched somewhere in Jerusalem. Someone from the ancient world left a message here, and I think I know who it was.”

“Not unless the fragment is signed, which it bloody isn’t.”