“My latest baby,” a voice yelled out. “Come over and let me show you.”
They looked into the cavernous interior and saw Costas directing a team of workmen behind the truck, his overalls smeared with a fresh layer of oil and grime. He had excused himself from the meeting at the same time as O’Connor and was now fully engrossed in his work. The hangar was a fantastic jumble of technical projects, some on the drawing board and others clearly at the experimental stage. Through the flash of a welding torch Jack could make out the battered form of the ADSA, the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, which had saved him from the wreckage of Seaquest only six months before. Ranged on either side were the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles in which he and Costas had first seen the silt-shrouded walls of Atlantis, their metal carapaces still streaked yellow from the sulphurous waters of the Black Sea.
“We’re nearly ready to roll,” Costas called out. “A final systems check and that’s it.”
Jack and Maria wove their way towards him through piles of hardware and semi-finished projects, Jeremy bringing up the rear. Costas put up his hand to order a generator switched off and the unearthly din subsided. He beckoned them over to the contraption on the truck, his face beaming with excitement. “You may have seen something like this in our pictures from the Golden Horn,” he said to Maria and Jeremy. “The ferret, the sub-bottom borer we’re using to dig through the seabed to the medieval layers. I haven’t got a name for this one yet, but it does a similar job. Spot the difference?”
“Let me take a look.” Jeremy craned forward, peering intently at the forward end of the contraption. He grunted, stooped down to look under the cradle and then straightened up, ignoring the streak of grease he had acquired on his tweed jacket. He pushed his glasses up and squinted at Costas. “It cuts through ice.”
“Very good.” Costas raised his eyebrows and winked at Jack. “Go on.”
“It has an electrical element around the rim,” Jeremy said. “I’d guess a superheated element using semiconductor materials, probably in a ceramic matrix. And that box behind looks like a high-energy laser device.”
“I’m impressed. Pretty good for a medieval historian. You’re in the wrong line of work.”
“When I applied for my Rhodes fellowship it was either engineering or Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My school was very conservative.”
“You drew the short end of the straw.”
“I disagree,” Maria said. They all laughed and Jeremy looked ruefully at the contraption. Costas slapped an oily hand on Jeremy’s back and turned to Jack.
“We’re air-freighting it out this evening,” he said, his demeanour now serious. “I had a call from James Macleod a few minutes ago and he said the ice conditions are perfect. Another day or two and the summer melt could make it too risky. I’m flying out to Greenland tomorrow morning to oversee the setup. And there’s something else. He mentioned a local, some old guy, who claimed to have seen some old ship’s timbers in the ice. Something to do with a European expedition way back, before the Second World War. Macleod was adamant that you should see the guy, and soon. Apparently he’s on his last legs. I know it’s a bit of a diversion on the trip back to Istanbul, but you might just want to tag along.”
Back in the office, Jack clicked off his cellphone and swivelled his chair back to face the conference table. After a conversation with Maurice Hiebermeyer and Tom York on Sea Venture, he felt reassured that the excavation in the Golden Horn could carry on for another forty-eight hours without him. The greatest prize, he now knew, might lie elsewhere, in a place they could never have imagined, but the Golden Horn could still contain treasures of inestimable historical value. The team were riding on a wave of euphoria after the cannon and chain discoveries and had already begun to use Costas’ probe to penetrate the harbour sediments, but it was hit and miss and could be days before they came up trumps.
“Right,” he said. “What have you got?”
O’Connor sat with a small green-backed book pressed open in front of him, Greek text visible on one side and English on the other. Costas had excused himself and returned to the engineering complex, but Maria and Jeremy sat expectantly at the table with Jack.
“In his book The Jewish Wars, Josephus tells us that Vespasian had the treasures locked away in the Temple of Jupiter,” O’Connor began. “But we know they were transferred to the Temple of Peace when that was completed a few years into Vespasian’s reign. After that there’s no mention of the menorah for hundreds of years.”
“But surely the emperor would have wanted to display his loot at every opportunity, at parades and festivals in the city,” Maria protested.
“Vespasian was the supreme embodiment of the Roman imperial virtues,” Jack interjected. “Conquest, stability, building. As a young man he commanded a legion in the conquest of Britain, and as emperor he oversaw the conquest of Judaea. Then he stabilised the empire following the disastrous reign of Nero. Now his focus was entirely on building. The Temple of Peace, the monuments in the Forum damaged by the Great Fire of AD 64 under Nero, above all the Colosseum. He didn’t need to shout about his triumphs anymore.”
“There may be more to it than that,” O’Connor said cautiously. “You know, it’s an odd feature of Josephus’ account of the triumph that he only mentions the execution of Simon, the charismatic Jewish leader who’d been brought in chains to Rome. There’s nothing on the fate of the hundreds of other Jewish captives, men, women and children. Some of us now believe there was an orgy of murder at the end of the procession, a scene so appalling Josephus couldn’t bring himself to describe it. After all, these were his people, and he never forsook his Jewish faith. When Vespasian saw it, he too was repulsed. The emperor was a tough old soldier, as ruthless as any Roman to his enemies, but was well known for his hatred of gratuitous bloodshed. Perhaps he contrived an ill omen as an excuse never to celebrate the Jewish triumph again, secretly instructing his priests to keep the menorah under lock and key for all time.”
“And then the trail goes cold,” Maria said.
“All we have to go on is Procopius.” O’Connor gestured at the book in front of him. “He was an eyewitness to the last great attempt to reunite the Roman Empire, when the Byzantine general Belisarius recaptured Rome from the Vandals and Goths who had overrun the western provinces in the fifth century AD.”
“It amazes me that the menorah survived for so long in Rome without being looted,” Jack said. “Those weren’t exactly centuries of peace and harmony. Think of Commodus, the demented son of Marcus Aurelius. He thought he was the god Hercules, and melted down most of the imperial treasure to pay for gladiatorial contests. Or the anarchy of the third century, when there were more than thirty emperors in fifty years. The Temple of Peace was a well-known repository for the spoils of war, and its treasuries would surely have been thrown open to find gold to pay for the mercenary armies of each new claimant to the throne.”
“Absolutely.” O’Connor paused, then looked piercingly at Jack and lowered his voice. “I must ask you again to keep what I say within these four walls. The answer is staring at us in that image of the Arch of Titus. In the 1970s a sonar survey by a conservation team revealed a hidden chamber in the attic, behind the dedicatory inscription.”
Jack’s jaw dropped. “You’re not suggesting the menorah was hidden away inside the arch?”
O’Connor hesitated again, then reached inside his cassock and pulled out a brown envelope. “Few realize that the Arch of Titus is under Vatican control, one of many ancient monuments in Rome consecrated by the Church in the Middle Ages as a way of stamping papal authority on everything pagan. My predecessor in the Vatican Antiquities Department tried endlessly to have the chamber opened, but each application was rebuffed by the cardinals. I believe his persistence was the main reason for his dismissal from the Vatican. I finally managed it last month during the current programme of restoration work on the arch. One evening the chief conservator and I were alone on the scaffold inspecting progress, and a stone abutting the chamber gave way. An accident of course, you understand.”