The Last Ember Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    All this evidence will be destroyed.
    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.

6
    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