Free The Last Ember by Daniel Levin

sensed her rising frustration. Do not fall into the trap he is setting, his gesture warned.
    “You are being emotional,” Tatton replied. “ So emotional that you’ve made up a theory that some lost meaning lies beneath this fragment’s surface.” His expression was now deadly serious, watching her suspiciously, “All to vindicate your own emotions!”
    “Emotions?” Emili said, simmering. “What I have told you are facts!” But by now, her pitch was too loud for the decorum of the courtroom, proving exactly the point Tatton set out to make from the start. “And no, I have not made up a theory. Someone on my team is dead, and there is nothing theoretical about that!” Her shrill voice echoed against the courtroom’s back wall. The magistrate banged a gavel. Fiorello exhaled audibly at the UN table.
    “Decorum, Dottoressa ,” the magistrate whispered to her in a gentle rebuke, but understanding the pain that Tatton had managed expertly, with devastating subtlety, to expose.
    “No further questions, Magistrato ,” Tatton said.

11
    W alking deeper beneath the Temple Mount, Salah ad-Din and Cianari stood on the narrow stone aqueduct with the darkness of an abyss on either side. A thin trickle of water moved down the trough.
    “An aqueduct,” the professor said, touching the water. “Just as described in biblical texts. An aqueduct used in the daily purification and sacrificial duties carried out by the priests on the altar.”
    At the end of the aqueduct bridge, the ground widened to a tunnel lined with ancient columns the size of redwood trees.
    “These columns are older than the Second Temple built by Herod,” the professor said. “Look at the Assyrian design and the rough, chipped trowel markings.” The professor turned around, the glint of excited disbelief in his eyes. “They are from the First Temple built by Solomon, dating to the eighth century B.C. Herod must have used these pillars to support the foundation of the Second Temple, which was built overhead.” He knew the find of these columns alone was career-making. There were notoriously few archaeological remains from the Solomonic era, especially after the Israel Museum’s only relic from the First Temple, an ivory pomegranate-shaped top of a scepter, was deemed to have a forged Aramaic inscription. Professor Cianari knew the Waqf had used the lack of evidence to challenge that there even was a biblical temple.
    In front of them, huge sections of stone rubble lay on either side of the tunnel, allowing only a small passageway between.
    “These stones are from the Assyrian siege of the First Temple in 715 B.C.,” Professor Cianari said, his voice straining as he lifted himself over a large column lying across the corridor. Clumsily, he rolled over the column, dropping the large sketches he carried in his arms. He marveled at the massive stones lining the corridor and tried to match up his surroundings to the hypothetical sketches of what archaeologists suggested lay beneath the Temple Mount. His colleagues still debated whether these secret passages even existed , and here he was walking through them. At a moment like this Cianari remembered why he journeyed to Jerusalem. Without permits or a budget, Salah ad-Din’s secret excavations beneath Rome and Jerusalem allowed the professor to defy the Roman archaeological superintendent’s bureaucracy that had relegated him to a library as if to a prison.
    Beyond the stones, the subterranean tunnel came to an abrupt end in a high dirt-packed wall.
    Cianari consulted a parchment map and then looked up at the wall. “This tunnel collapsed in the earthquake of 1202, blocking the entrance to the Royal Cavern.”
    “The Royal Cavern,” Salah ad-Din said. “You will be the first archaeologist to confirm its existence.”
    “The cavern has been forgotten for a thousand years,” the professor said, exhilarated. “Josephus described an enormous subterranean cavern beneath the Temple Mount used as a