The Last Ember by Daniel Levin Page A

kouros of questionable provenance. Nothing broken, but the physicians protested his departure, wanting to prod him further. Profeta ignored them and returned to the Command at dawn. He knew they were running out of time.
    The lab had not yet returned any information about the corpse. Because of much-needed emotional release, the lieutenants created their own mythology surrounding the discovery. “The Princess of the Pier,” Profeta overheard them call her. The junior officers created a betting pool, wagering on her age pending laboratory results.
    A first slide appeared on the screen: an oversized photograph of the female corpse submerged inside the viscous fluid of the ancient column. Taken from the foot of the sarcophagus, the crisp digital image made the woman’s naked figure even more lifelike.
    “Late last night, beside an unused commercial dock in Civitavecchia, our team discovered this victim, female, age estimates range in the late thirties, and the cause of death appears to be lacerations sustained across her torso. The perpetrators disguised the homicide as an ancient burial: a perfect imitation of a Corinthian maiden.”
    “Corinthian maiden?” Brandisi asked.
    “An ancient practice in which conquerors marched women prisoners of war back to their city and literally buried them inside columns. They were called Corinthian maidens.”
    “Barbaric,” another officer said.
    “It’s no coincidence that the flutes of Corinthian columns today still imitate the folds of the togas of women once buried inside them,” the comandante said, “or that our Ionic capitals emulate the hairstyle of first-century women.” Profeta knew how much of classical architecture bore hidden cultic secrets. Universities trimmed their buildings with moldings of eggs, darts, and claws, not realizing that any ancient Roman would recognize those symbols as the trappings of pagan sacrifice.
    “Could this have been a cult murder?” one of the officers asked. “An initiation rite gone too far?”
    “Could be,” Profeta said. “Someone studied the ancient practice carefully, right down to the emollients used in ancient Rome. The hoax appears better researched than any I have seen. Next slide, please.”
    Profeta nodded toward the back of the room. The next slide displayed ornately illustrated parchment pages lying scattered on the warehouse floor.
    “We found dozens of these pages. They are from manuscripts hundreds of years old. Most would have been quite valuable, particularly this fifteenth-century page”—Profeta touched the screen with his pointer—“except someone made them virtually worthless.” The slide changed, displaying a close-up of a manuscript’s text. Inked bracket markings and circled letters dotted the parchment’s ornate script. “Someone marked up the texts, conducting research of some kind. Has anyone noticed what all these pages have in common?”
    Even under pressure, the comandante never missed an opportunity to impart a historical context to improve his officers’ investigative skills. He offered a continuing education in ancient history so rigorous that his lessons became renowned across Interpol’s antiquities units.
    Profeta stepped to the side of the projector’s screen and, on the dry-erase board behind him, wrote in big block letters.

FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS , A.D. 30 TO A.D. 100
    “Flavius Josephus,” Profeta said, pointing up at the illustrated manuscripts on the screen. “Notice how the first letter on each page is decorated with a small portrait of a city in flames, depicting the smoldering turrets of Jerusalem’s city walls after the Roman siege. It was Flavius Josephus who wrote the defining eyewitness account of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, known as Bellum Iudacium , or The Jewish War . It became an instant best seller in the ancient world, recopied by scribes throughout the ages. By the Renaissance, Josephus’s histories were the most widely read texts in the Western world after