The Last Ember by Daniel Levin Read Free Book Online

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.
    Now, years later, Salah ad-Din stood beside Professor Cianari, surveying the subterranean cavern they had just discovered. His conquest was more imminent than ever.
    “The Temple Mount was surrounded by fifty thousand Roman soldiers,” he said, turning to the professor, “and the priest escaped through here, along this aqueduct.”
    His flashlight revealed a narrow stone aqueduct stretching into the darkness. It appeared to float across the dark chasm that lay on either side.
    “And he took with him the one artifact that brought down a Roman emperor.”

8
    R ome’s morning traffic crawled across the Ponte Palatino, and Jonathan raced up the marble steps of the Palazzo di Giustizia, taking two steps in each stride. The building’s vast neoclassical façade stretched like a civic temple along the Tiber’s bank, longer than two United States Supreme Court buildings laid end to end.
    In the interior loggia of the courthouse, Jonathan gave up his passport and stepped through a metal detector. Fifteen-foot statues of famous Roman lawyers from Cicero to nineteenth-century Italian lawmakers adorned marble hallways vaulting upward higher than a cathedral’s.
    At the end of one cavernous hallway, Jonathan saw a cluster of people filing into a courtroom. The last of the group was a young woman with blond hair tied in a loose bun. She wore a gray wool pantsuit, a cream silk blouse beneath her cutaway jacket, and stylish black-framed glasses. Her professional, slim-fitting suit was a far cry from the oversized cable-knit sweaters she wore at the American Academy, but Jonathan knew at once it was Dottoressa Emili Travia.
    As though feeling his gaze, Emili glanced down the corridor. Jonathan stopped, separated by much more than the expanse of marble between them. From her unyielding glare, Jonathan knew his role as a lawyer in this trial was not a secret. Neither of them said a word. She held the stare, as if she were trying to sift through his past, searching for the clue that would reveal the gradual decline in his ethics that had allowed him to take this case. Even from a distance, Jonathan could see her lightly bite her bottom lip, which she always did when she was thinking. They were full lips, accented by her narrow chin and delicate features. Her beauty was more striking, more daunting than he remembered. Without a change in her expression, she turned around and walked through the courtroom door.
    The courtroom was as grand as Jonathan had imagined. Pilasters separated triple-height Palladian windows overlooking Rome. The one modern amenity was a bullet-repellent glass witness case, which Jonathan supposed was installed for use in Mafia trials. The original dark wood witness stand, which would be used in this morning’s hearing, sat near the bench.
    The Dulling and Pierce table was in front of the courtroom’s gallery rail, where Tatton was already seated at the table’s end. Beside him, Mildren was writing furiously on a legal pad, transcribing Jonathan’s memo for Tatton’s cross-examination. On the other side of the courtroom, beside their table, the lawyers for the Italian Cultural Ministry had set up an easel with large poster-board photographs of the various inscriptions on the Forma Urbis fragments. Behind the polished walnut helm between them sat a small Italian magistrate with dated brown plastic