by Daniel Levin
“To the port of Rome,” Emili said, her eyes widening at the sheer scope of the ancient operation.
“Josephus knew that only a priest could tend the flame in exile,” Jonathan said, just as stunned by their discovery. “He had to bring it with him.”
68
A long the Via Nomentana, Profeta stood in view of the skeleton of the Villa Torlonia. The carabinieri cars behind him idled in front of the high gates of what seemed an abandoned, overgrown park. The dark mansion was faintly visible in the morning fog. Rufio stood beside him, staring into the grounds. Weeds had overtaken the formal gardens that surrounded the abandoned, ramshackle villa.
“According to the police report,” Lieutenant Brandisi said, “Jonathan Marcus was excavating over there seven years ago.” He pointed near the villa.
“Looks haunted,” Rufio said.
“It is,” Profeta said. “By political ghosts, at the very least. Mussolini commandeered the villa as his private residence, and during the German occupation, the SS officers took up residence there in 1943.”
“Not exactly owners to brag about,” Brandisi said.
“It explains why the city let the villa fall into disrepair. Rome is still selective about what parts of its past it chooses to preserve.”
“Where are the tombs, Comandante?”
“All around us. Eight miles of catacombs are buried under here.”
“Eight miles?” Brandisi said.
“The areas outside ancient Rome were giant cities of the dead,” Profeta said. “Eventually, palazzos and embassies were built over them.”
A security guard opened the villa’s gate.
“Comandante, maybe we’re wasting time,” Rufio said. “Why are we here?”
Brandisi’s walkie-talkie came to life. “An officer just located some excavation at the foot of the villa,” he told Profeta.
They approached the excavation, walking through abandoned gardens that resembled the dark wood of a fairy tale. Black moss covered the villa’s pathway. A white tomb no higher than an altar protruded from the ground. One of the tomb’s marble walls was missing.
“Look at this,” Brandisi said, shining his flashlight to the right. A two-foot trench had been dug alongside the tomb, where a heavily rusted pipe had been extracted from the earth, revealing a broken pipe joint.
“It could have been a utility crew fixing a gas leak,” Rufio suggested.
“Not a utility crew, Lieutenant.” Profeta knelt in the grass. “Someone applied an acidic compound to the tombstone to make it illegible.”
Profeta shone his flashlight into the tomb. He immediately recognized the inside chamber from the photographs taken by Professor Cianari. Missing from the center of the chamber was the column containing the woman they had found in the warehouse the night before. The top half of the column lay in the cavern, cut into small pieces.
“So this is where they found her,” Profeta said, his voice echoing in the chamber.
“Her?”
“The woman we discovered in the warehouse,” Profeta said. He pointed to a faint marble inscription that had been partially rubbed out: “Sepulcrus Berenice Regina.” Princess Berenice’s Tomb.
“Her name explains the extravagant burial. She was Berenice, the last princess of Jerusalem.”
As Profeta stepped back from the tomb, he saw a piece of evidence he did not expect to find. Lying in the wet grass was a small unbleached piece of paper, doused from days of rain.
Cigarette rolling paper.
Without Lieutenant Rufio’s noticing, Profeta put it in his pocket.
69
Emili heard the sound of feet scraping down the corridor. “That guard isn’t far behind.”
Above the shouting, the sound of bullets now clamored against the rock walls.
“Let’s go,” Jonathan said.
But even as they ran, Emili could not help marveling how this tunnel confirmed the biblical story of Hezekiah’s mysterious water source during the Assyrian siege. It will only be a matter of time before Salah ad-Din destroys this, too, she thought.
“Can you hear that?” Jonathan asked, close behind her.
“I know, the guards are getting closer,” Emili said.
“I mean the water,” Jonathan said. They both stopped. The sound of an underground stream was unmistakable. “We must be close to a water source.” He shone his flashlight in front of them.
The corridor extended for another few inches. Emili had been so close to the edge that one of her shoes stuck out into the blackness.
Beyond the edge of the tunnel, Jonathan’s flashlight revealed a strange forest of white vines descending from above.
“They’re the roots of the olive trees in the valley above,” Emili said. “Some of those trees are over a thousand years old.”
The bouncing beams of the guards’ flashlights were now visible behind them.
“These roots must have followed the water level of the stream as it lowered over the centuries,” he said. “We can use them to rappel down to the stream, using the rock wall.”
“Rappel down?” Emili said. “Those roots will never hold us.”
A gun shot whizzed past them.
“Okay, you first,” Emili said.
Jonathan reached for the olive tree’s roots, but they were too far from the tunnel’s edge. He jumped and clutched a lacy tangle of roots as he swung between the walls of the shaft. The roots were surprisingly dry and brittle, and he could feel the strain of his weight on them. But they were strong enough to hold. He slid down the roots a half-foot and found a crook in the rock wall to rest the weight of his legs.
“Now you!” he called to Emili. “Jump above me!”
Emili threw herself toward the roots. With both hands she grabbed the same shoot Jonathan had, and rested her feet on Jonathan’s shoulders.
“Don’t move,” Jonathan whispered. “They’re right above us.”
They could hear the rushing water below; above them the guards’ flashlights were only a few feet away. The guards were now yelling, blaming each other for choosing the wrong tunnel.
Jonathan and Emili remained still, hanging in the darkness. The only sound was the crackling of the olive tree’s roots, withstanding the strain of both their weights—for the moment.
“It’s not holding.” Emili’s frightened whisper was barely audible. Some of the roots snapped, lowering them a few unnerving inches before they stopped. The Waqf guards stood at the edge of the precipice, their beams searching the darkness, but not below the tunnel’s edge where Jonathan and Emili swung from the roots.
Jonathan could hear the roots beginning to crack. He looked up. They were now hanging from a single, unraveling shoot.
One of the guards must have heard the sound because he shone his flashlight over the edge and exposed them hanging there. But there was no time for the guard to react.
The root snapped, the sound as sharp as a breaking stick. And like deadweight, their bodies fell, twisting, into the chasm.
70
Within seconds of the blast in the Western Wall plaza, a black armored Volkswagen with tinted windows and Palestinian plates slowed to a stop in front of the Damascus Gate. A young bearded mullah jumped out and opened the Mercedes’ polyethylene-reinforced steel door. Salah ad-Din ducked into the backseat, which was outfitted with a customized ViaSat satellite terminal for streaming data and a satellite phone the size of an early-model, large cellular. Salah ad-Din turned his attention to the screen, where he received a live streaming feed from a video camera inside the tunnel’s blast site.
The Israeli police was already setting up parameters around the Old City—standard procedure after a terrorist bombing—and Salah ad-Din’s immediate departure was a necessary precaution.
Ostia, Salah ad-Din thought.
The car traveled toward the Gaza border, and Salah ad-Din held a mobile phone in one hand and his grandfather’s lifetime of notes in a tattered leather book in the other. If the grand mufti only
knew the critical information his grandson had just discovered, his wonderment would be rivaled only by the technology that streamed information to the computer screen in front of him.
“Keep searching for other inscriptions,” Salah ad-Din said. “We must be sure it is in Ostia.”
On the screen Salah ad-Din could make out the craggy limestone walls of the vault lit by the purple floodlight. The hidden gate came into view, blown diagonally across the corridor’s walls.
“We are still in the circular room, Sheikh,” said a voice behind the camera. He tilted the camera up to show the vault. A large block of stone sat below the center of the vault. Stairs had been carved into the stone. “It is the only inscription in the room.”
“Show it again.”
The camera bore down on the stone, and the inscription came into view, but the light directly on the smooth limestone created a glare that made it illegible on the screen.
“Dim the floodlight,” Salah ad-Din said evenly, but there was anticipation in his voice.
As the light softened, the inscription came into sharp view, just as he had seen it himself a minute before.
A Captivo ad Ostia Romae.
So the menorah is not beneath Jerusalem. Salah ad-Din had suspected the ingenious nature of Josephus’s plan for years, and calculated accordingly.
Salah ad-Din dialed the number of his exchange server in Paris, which connected him through to a cell phone in Rome.
The other line answered and Salah ad-Din uttered one word.
“Ostia,” he spoke into his satellite phone.
“You saw the inscription? You are certain?” a nervous female voice said.
“Yes, it is in Ostia. When will the plane arrive?”
“Forty minutes. The Gaza border, just as you arranged.”
“I must excavate today. I require maps immediately.”
“Ostia spans three miles,” the voice said. “How will you know where to dig?”
“Josephus disclosed the menorah’s location in a line of text.”
“But to see the Renaissance manuscripts of Josephus, you will require access to the Sala Consultazione Manoscritti in the Vatican Library.”
“The information I need is not in the Vatican Library,” Salah ad-Din said. “It is in the archives of the Great Synagogue in Rome.”
71
Jonathan tumbled through twenty feet of black air before splashing feet-first into a thick bed of pond scum. The algae nearly immobilized his arms, but his legs moved more freely, treading in the water. A slim curtain of daylight illuminated the cavern through a crevasse.
“Emili!” Jonathan yelled.
A hand tightly gripped his arm and he whirled around. Emili surfaced beside him, her face covered in thick ropes of pond scum.
“So the roots will hold us, huh?” Emili slowly shook her head.
He wiped a piece of algae off her cheek. “You okay?”
“Okay? A crazed man with a Kalashnikov is thirty feet above us, and I don’t see a way out of here. ‘Okay’ would be an exaggeration.”
They waded through the sludge and climbed onto a narrow rock bank at the far end of the cavern. Emili slipped, knocking a stone from the bank into the water.
“Maybe if we could climb up these roots—” Jonathan began, and then stopped, staring at the stone that had just rolled into the water. It had broken through the pond scum. The water was a radiant blue, as though illuminated from beneath.
Jonathan stared at the water, transfixed. “Why is the water glowing?”
“What are you talking about? It can’t be glo—” Emili looked down.
An incandescent blue glow emanated in the shape of the rock that had broken through the algae. It looked like an expensively lit resort pool.
Jonathan cleared more of the surface. The whole pond was a vivid, electric blue.
“Why is it that color?”
“There must be an opening under the water, allowing light to flood through.” Jonathan turned to Emili. “We’ll have to swim through it.”
Jonathan rolled up his soaking sleeves for greater ease in the water. Emili grabbed his arm.
“Jon, we don’t even know where it goes!”
There was a sudden splash behind them.
“The Waqf guards are lowering ropes,” Jonathan said. The shouts in Arabic grew louder, and guns banged against the rock face.
Emili looked uneasily at the water.
“Al tre si parte?” she said. Count of three, then?
Jonathan nodded. “Deep breath. Follow me to the bottom.”
“One.”
A flashlight panned across the water and held them in its beam. They heard the triumphant shout of a Waqf guard.
“Two,” Emili said, squeezing Jonathan’s hand. Their gazes turned to the black water. “Three!”
They both dived in, and swam toward the light, kicking deeper into the water’s enveloping peace. The sloshing of the Waqf guards above them sounded miles away. The light under the water grew brighter, moving from a purple bruise to a pastel cloud as the pressure in their ears mounted. Near the floor of the pond they could see a rock hollow, a glowing circle just large enough to swim through. Emili went first, propelling herself into the blue light. Jonathan’s dress shirt floated around him as he moved through the hole after her, taking giant breast strokes upward. On all sides of them, high-tech underwater tube-lighting came into view.
72
A tour group of visiting Southern Baptists from the Valley of Souls Congregation in Hillsboro, West Virginia, stared at the peaceful subterranean pool of water before returning to their air-conditioned bus parked outside the Hezekiah Tunnel tour. After a moment of silent prayer, Pastor Josiah Briggens, the group’s animated preacher, led them in a reading from Psalms in the dark tunnel by candlelight. The congregation was hushed with awe, gazing at the underground spring, where according to Gospel, Jesus cured the blind. The reverend boomed Psalm 91 in a thick West Virginia twang.
“And let us learn from these peaceful waters,” he said. His congregants looked devoutly at the electric blue water, standing at the farthest point permitted for tour groups inside the ancient tunnel.
“That these waters,” the reverend cried out, “should spread their calm over Israel, that their stillness will—”
As if on cue, the still surface of the water shattered like glass.
Jonathan and Emili broke through, splashing wildly, gasping for air.
The Valley of Souls members were stunned. Many screamed as others fell to their knees, crying out, “Hallelujah, father!”
Jonathan and Emili swam to the shore.
“Sweet Mary and Joseph!” the preacher screamed.
Jonathan smiled politely.
“Well, not exactly.”
73
The tunnel to Gaza is still open?” Salah ad-Din asked the driver. He knew that recent Israeli incursions had discovered many of the tunnels his men had used for years to cross beneath the Gaza-Israel border.
“Yes, Sheikh,” the driver, a young mullah, said. He pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road beside an abandoned roadside fruit stand. Now boarded up, the stand’s faded Arabic sign for fresh pomegranates flapped in the desert wind. The driver looked at an illuminated grid of a palm-held global positioning device to confirm their location. He turned around and nodded solemnly to Salah ad-Din. This was the location where Salah ad-Din had to cross through a system of tunnels to reach Gaza. On the other side, a plane would transport him to Rome.
The fruit stand was one hundred meters from the first of a series of triple barbed-wire fences between there and the Gaza Strip.
The mullah removed an old pistol from beneath the driver’s seat. He stepped out of the car and walked toward the fruit stand. He returned a moment later and opened the sedan’s rear door.
“The tunnel is secure, Sheikh,” he said in Arabic.
Salah ad-Din approached the fruit stand. He pulled one of the pine-board side panels loose and stepped into
the booth. Bending down, he lifted part of the floor to reveal the opening of an arms smuggler’s tunnel. He slipped into the tunnel, moving the board back into place above him. The air in the tunnel was thick, smelling of wet cement.
Salah ad-Din felt his way through the tunnel’s darkness. It was a good, tall tunnel, and he ducked only slightly as he walked. Arms dealers dug the best tunnels between Gaza and Israel, he knew. Passing under the high stone cement wall that separated Gaza from Israel, he could hear the Hebrew chatter of Israeli soldiers on border patrol above him.
The tunnel’s exit was another two hundred meters inside the Gaza Strip.
Salah ad-Din reached the end and climbed a ladder up into another roadside shack. As he emerged, he saw an old-model BMW waiting for him, its white paint peeling, headlights dimmed by the swirling gales of sand. Salah ad-Din climbed into the backseat.
The car headed south until reaching the Gaza border with Egypt. Salah ad-Din got out of the car and slid through a sawed opening in the electrified border fence. On the other side, he walked across an abandoned stretch of broken asphalt, where he could see the tail of a midnight-blue Cessna Citation X with Egyptian military clearance. Salah ad-Din chose this particular plane from an Iranian sheikh’s wide collection, not only because its dual hydraulic engines made it the fastest civilian aircraft in the world, but because its flying altitude of 51,000 feet made it imperceptible on most radars. The Cessna had nearly turned around before landing here, because of the windstorm that now transformed the desert air into a thick orange haze in all directions.
As Salah ad-Din walked toward the plane, the wind felt solid and he covered his face with his sleeve. A man in a tightly wrapped kaffiyeh escorted him up the aluminum steps to the plane.
“Less than three hours until we arrive in Rome, Sheikh,” he said loudly in the wind. “The team has already begun in Ostia.”