The Last Ember Read Online Free PDF Page B

in ash.”
    “You mean Pompeii?”
    “Right, and Titus’s magicians told him it was the vengeance of the God of Israel to choose Pompeii, a city named for the only other Roman emperor to enter the Temple’s inner sanctum in Jerusalem.”
    “The only mistake I see here, Marcus, is that you’re spending billable hours on this. Whatever you saw was just coincidence, a reflection, or maybe—”
    “A message intended to escape the Roman censors,” Jonathan interrupted. “It could be ancient steganography at its finest.”
    “Stenography? What’s a court reporter got to do with this?”
    “That’s steno graphy, from the Greek steno , narrow, and grapho , writing, meaning ‘shorthand.’ Steganography is different. It’s an ancient form of encryption. Letters buried under blank wax, or smuggled inside the belly of a hare. Steganos means a concealed note, as in hidden writing. A steganographic message isn’t simply encrypted, you don’t even know it’s there.”
    “Concealed writing, right.” Mildren’s tone was even, as though to draw Jonathan out further. “An encrypted message.”
    “Except that encryption gives you privacy, but someone still knows you’re sending a message, like Caesar sending encoded letters to his generals or the Internet scattering your credit card number until it reaches the vendor. Steganography offers not only privacy, but secrecy, obscuring that you have sent any message at all. Whether it’s a nineteenth-century British spy disguising enemy artillery positions in butterfly-wing drawings or a twenty-first-century Iraqi insurgent embedding an MP3 file within written text, the technique is the same. Ancient espionage differed only by method.”
    “Ancient espionage,” Mildren repeated in a monotone.
    “I know it sounds a little crazy—”
    “A little crazy!” Mildren’s voice escalated to a shout. “We are in the middle of a hearing and you’re dreaming up some kind of ancient spy plot! I mean, Jon, you’re talking about ancient Rome here, not the Cold War.”
    “Hundreds of years before Rome, Herodotus described the Greeks’ tattooing secret messages on the scalp beneath the hair of slaves. They wrote invisibly with urine, wax, and cipher codes to hide—”
    “The only thing hidden, Marcus, is your point.”
    “My point is that if the prosecution sees this message, it could support Emili’s—Dr. Travia’s allegations. It might explain why these fragments were stolen and researched somewhere in Jerusalem. Someone from the ancient world left a message here, and I think I know who it was.”
    “Not unless the fragment is signed, which it bloody isn’t.”
    “But it may be,” Jonathan said. “The Latin inscription on the underside of the fragment.”
    “A monument revealed to Josephus,” Mildren said. “You’re the one who translated it.”
    “Not to Josephus, but by Josephus. The Latin would be spelled the same way in both cases. This hidden inscription might have been carved by Josephus himself.”
    “Let’s just hope your legal arguments are more consistent. Why would Josephus have to leave secret messages? You said an hour ago that he was Titus’s chum, and every researcher agrees with that.”
    “Not every researcher ,” Jonathan said, his tone gathering conviction. “At the academy I researched the possibility that Josephus was not a traitor to Jerusalem, but surrendered to the Romans to become a—”
    “Spy?” Mildren cut him off.
    “Yes,” Jonathan nodded. “A spy from Jerusalem planted in the Roman court.”
    Mildren rose from his desk. “Let me give you some advice, Marcus. I’ll keep it simple. No hidden messages here, nothing backward, inside out, upside down, okay? Here it is: This conversation never happened.”
    “Which conversation?”
    “This one, the one we’re having right now. You were never in my office, and you most certainly did not discover any Bible code-type messages under the artifacts on trial. No rays of light. Am