by Daniel Silva
Gabriel walked past a trestle table heaped with coins and ancient tools and slipped between two of the pillars. He touched one and asked Lavon what had happened to them after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple.
“The Scriptures are unclear, but we always assumed the Babylonians hurled them over the walls of the Temple Mount and into the Kidron Valley.” He looked at Gabriel with a rueful smile. “Sound familiar?”
“Very,” said Gabriel.
Lavon moved to the next pillar. It was about eight feet in height, and one side was blackened by fire. “ ‘They made Your sanctuary go up in flames,’ ” he intoned, quoting Psalms 74, “ ‘they brought low in dishonor the dwelling-place of Your presence.’ ”
“You need to be leaving, Eli.”
“Where am I going to go? Upstairs to the riot?”
“Make your way through the aqueducts back to the Western Wall Tunnel.”
“And what am I supposed to do if I run into another group of Saladin’s warriors? Fight them off with my pickax like a Crusader?”
“Take my gun.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“You were in the army, Eli.”
“I was a medic.”
“Eli,” said Gabriel in exasperation, but Lavon was no longer listening. He was moving slowly from pillar to pillar, his expression a mixture of astonishment and anger. “They must have hauled them out of the valley in 538 BC, when the Persian Empire authorized the construction of the Second Temple. And when Herod renovated the place five centuries later, he probably used them as part of the supporting structure, which would explain why the Waqf found them when they were digging around up here. They were too big to take to the dump or throw into the Kidron Valley again, so they hid them here, along with everything else they ripped from the mountain.” He looked around the vast cavern. “Even if we are able to get this material out of here, it has no proper context anymore. It’s as if it was . . .”
“Looted,” said Gabriel.
“Yes. Looted.”
“We’ll get it out, Eli, but you really should go now.”
“I’m not leaving these things here alone,” Lavon answered. He was drifting from pillar to pillar, his face tilted skyward. “The contemporary models and drawings of the First Temple oftentimes put a roof over the heikhal, but there wasn’t one. It was an open courtyard with two-story chambers on three sides. And at the far western end of the structure was the debir, the Holy of Holies, where they kept the Ark of the Covenant.”
Lavon approached the spot slowly because it was there that Imam Darwish had chosen to place the bomb. It was no ordinary bomb, thought Gabriel. It was a Western Wall of explosives, wired and primed and waiting to detonate. Were it something small, Gabriel might have been able to disarm it with a sapper whispering in his ear. But not this.
“How do you suppose they were able to do it?”
“I’m sure Imam Darwish will be happy to tell us.”
Lavon shook his head slowly. “We were fools to let them have complete control of this place. Who knows? Maybe we should have behaved like every other army that conquered Jerusalem.”
“Tear down the Dome and al-Aqsa? Rebuild the Temple? You don’t really believe that would have been the right thing to do, Eli.”
“No,” he admitted, “but at a moment like this, I’m allowed to imagine what it might have been like.”
Gabriel looked at his watch.
“How many minutes left?”
“If Dina is right—”
“Dina is always right,” Lavon interjected.
“Twenty-five minutes,” said Gabriel. “Which is why you need to get out of here.”
Lavon turned his back to the bomb and lifted his arms toward the avenue of pillars. “There isn’t a single authenticated artifact from the First or Second Temple. Not one. It’s the reason why Palestinian leaders have been able to convince their people that the Temples were a myth. And it’s the reason why they hid these pillars in a hole one hundred and sixty-seven feet beneath the surface.” He looked at Gabriel and smiled. “And it’s the reason why I’m not leaving this mountain until I know these pillars are safe.”
“They’re just stones, Eli.”
“I know,” he said. “But they’re my stones.”
“Are you really willing to die for them?”
Lavon was silent for a moment. Then he turned to Gabriel. “You have a beautiful wife. Maybe someday you’ll have a beautiful child. Another beautiful child,” he added. “Me . . . these stones are all I have.”
“You’re the closest thing in the world I have to a brother, Eli. I’m not leaving you behind.”
“So we’ll die together,” Lavon said, “here, in the house of God.”
“I suppose there are worse places to die.”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose there are.”
At that moment, Imam Hassan Darwish was standing in the doorway of the underground structure that had been built on his orders, listening to the two Jews speaking in their ancient language. Darwish recognized them both. One was the noted biblical archaeologist Eli Lavon, a critic of the Waqf and its construction projects. The other, the one with gray temples and green eyes, was Gabriel Allon, the murderer of Palestinian heroes. Darwish could scarcely believe his good fortune. The presence of the two men would make his task more difficult. But it would also make his journey to Paradise far sweeter.
The imam turned his gaze from the men and looked at the explosive device that lay within the ruins of the First Jewish Temple. The man called Mr. Farouk had built a manual override into the detonator in the event of a scenario such as this and had instructed Darwish on how to trigger it. A flick of a switch was all it would take.
Just then, Darwish heard the clatter of boots in the aqueducts. It appeared the Jews had broken through the Waqf’s defenses. History was attempting to repeat itself. But not this time, thought Darwish. This time, the sacred shrines of Islam would not fall into the hands of the infidel, as they had in 1099, when the Crusaders besieged Jerusalem. This time would be different. A flick of a switch was all it would take.
The imam closed his eyes and, in his thoughts, recited the Verse of the Sword from the Koran: “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them, using every stratagem of war.” Then he charged into the museum of the ancient Jews and opened fire.
The first shots struck the ancient pillars and sent teardrops of flaming limestone into Gabriel’s cheek. Looking up, he saw Hassan Darwish running across the floor of the cavern, his face contorted with a hatred born of faith and history and a thousand humiliations large and small. Instantly, Gabriel leveled his own weapon and charged toward the imam as bullets flashed past his ears. He fired the gun as he had in the range beneath the Vatican, shot after shot without pause, until nothing remained of the imam’s face. Then, turning, he saw Eli Lavon crumpled on the ground, his arms wrapped around the base of one of the pillars. Gabriel pressed his palm against the bullet wound in Lavon’s chest and held him as the life started to leave his eyes. “Don’t die, Eli,” he whispered. “Damn you, Eli, please don’t die.”
PART FOUR
EGO TE ABSOLVO
47
JERUSALEM
WITHIN AN HOUR OF THE Israeli incursion onto the Temple Mount plateau, the third intifada erupted in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Initially, the heavily armed security forces of the Palestinian Authority tried to control the violence. But as images of Israeli troops in the Haram al-Sharif spread like wildfire across the Arab world, the militiamen joined the rioters and engaged Israeli troops in running gun battles. Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, Jenin, and Hebron all saw heavy fighting, but the worst of the clashes occurred in East Jerusalem, where several thousand Arabs tried but failed to retake the Temple Mount. By sunset, as sirens announced the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, Islam’s third-holiest shrine was under Israeli control, and the Middle East s
eemed precariously close to war.
The king of Jordan, himself a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, demanded the Israelis leave the Noble Sanctuary at once, but he stopped short of calling for violence to expel them. That was not the case, however, in Cairo, where the Muslim Brotherhood, the new leaders of the Arab world’s most populous nation, called for a pan-Islamic jihad to avenge the outrage. Hamas, a branch of the Brotherhood’s Islamist tree, immediately pummeled Beersheba and several other Israeli towns with a barrage of rockets that left ten Israelis dead. In Lebanon, however, Hezbollah remained curiously silent, as did its Shiite masters in Tehran.
Among the many challenges faced by Israeli officials during those explosive first hours was the presence of His Holiness Pope Paul VII. With the Old City of Jerusalem now a war zone, he took shelter in a monastery in Ein Kerem, the former Arab village just west of downtown Jerusalem that, according to Christian tradition, was the birthplace of John the Baptist. At the request of the Israeli prime minister, the pope agreed, albeit reluctantly, to cancel a planned Holy Saturday mass on the Mount of Beatitudes, along with Easter Sunday services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Regrettably, the Holy Father had little choice in the matter. The Sepulchre, the sacred Christian shrine that Saladin had wanted to raze, was one of the main targets of Muslim rage.
There were many in the papal entourage who pleaded with the Holy Father to return to the safety of the Vatican, but he insisted on staying in the misplaced hope his presence might help to calm the situation. He spent much of his time at the Hadassah Medical Center, located not far from the monastery. Needless to say, the pope’s frequent appearances at the hospital generated speculation that he was ill or had been injured in the violence. It wasn’t true; he was simply ministering to a soul in need.
The patient in question had arrived at the hospital in the first minutes of the uprising, a bullet in his chest, more dead than alive. The staff was told that his name was Weiss, but was given no other information except for his approximate age and his medical history, which included numerous disorders related to stress. The blinds over his window, which looked east toward the walls of the Old City, remained tightly drawn. Two armed guards stood watch outside his door, one to its right and one to its left.
The pope was not the only dignitary to visit the wounded man. The prime minister came to see him, as did the chief of staff of the IDF, the heads of the various Israeli intelligence services, and, for reasons never made clear to the hospital staff, a large delegation of archaeologists from Hebrew University and the Israel Antiquities Authority. There was one man, however, who never moved from the patient’s bedside. He made no attempt to conceal his identity, for it wouldn’t have been possible—not with those distinctive gray temples and unforgettable eyes.
He drank little, ate less, and slept not at all. When one of the doctors offered him a bed and a mild sedative, he was met by a glare of disapproval. After that, no one dared to ask him to leave—even on the second night, when, for two terrible minutes, the patient’s heart stopped beating. For the next twenty-four hours, the visitor remained motionless at the foot of the bed, his face illuminated by the glow of the ventilator, as if he were a figure in a painting by Caravaggio. Occasionally, the nurses could hear the figure speaking softly. His words never varied. “Don’t die, Eli. Damn you, Eli, please don’t die.”
On Easter morning, the tolling of Jerusalem’s church bells was scarcely audible over the sound of gunfire. At noon, a crude Palestinian rocket fell into the Garden of Gethsemane, and at mid-afternoon bullets raked the exterior of the Church of the Dormition. That evening, a distraught Holy Father paid one final visit to the unconscious patient before boarding his plane to return home. When he was gone, another elderly man took his place. He, too, was known to the staff of the trauma center. He was the one they spoke of only in whispers. The one who had stolen the secrets that led to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War. The one who had plucked Adolf Eichmann, managing director of the Holocaust, from an Argentine street corner. Shamron . . .
“You need to go home and get some rest, my son.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“When he opens his eyes.”
Shamron twirled his Zippo between his fingertips. Two turns to the left, two turns to the right.
“Must you, Ari?”
Shamron’s fingers went still. “You have to prepare yourself for the possibility he’s not going to make it.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it is the likely outcome. He’d lost nearly all his blood by the time they got him onto the table. His heart—”
“Is fine.”
“But it’s not as young as it once was,” Shamron said. “And neither is yours, my son. And I’m afraid of what will happen if it gets broken again.”
“I deserve it.”
“Why would you say such a thing?”
“I should have heard Darwish coming.”
“You both were distracted, which was understandable. It’s not every day that one has a chance to walk through the heikhal of the First Temple of Jerusalem.”
“Do you think the pillars truly are from the First Temple?”
“We know they are,” Shamron said. “We’re just waiting for the right moment to show them to the world.”
“Why wait?”
“Because we don’t want to do anything to make the situation any worse.”
“How much worse could it get?”
“There are ninety million Egyptians. Imagine what would happen if the Muslim Brotherhood convinced just ten percent of them to march on our borders. If that bomb had actually gone off . . .” Shamron’s voice trailed off. “It’s frightening to think how close we came—or how tenuous our existence is in this land.”
“How long are we planning to stay on the Temple Mount?”
“If it were up to me, we’d never leave. But the prime minister intends to hand it back to the Waqf as soon as all the archaeological material has been safely removed.”
“So we go back to the status quo?”
“Until the Islamic world is ready to accept our right to exist, I’m afraid the status quo is the best we can hope for.”
“I’d like to make one change to it, if it’s all right with you.”
“What’s that?”
“Massoud.”
Shamron smiled. “The next time a bomb goes off under his car, it won’t be a small one.”
Gabriel took hold of Lavon’s hand.
“If he dies, Ari, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I should have made him leave.”
“There’s no way Eli would have ever left that mountain without knowing those pillars were safe.”
“They’re just stones, Ari.”
“They’re Eli’s stones,” Shamron said. “And now they’re soaked in his blood.”
48
JERUSALEM
IT WOULD BE ANOTHER SEVENTY-TWO hours before sufficient order had been restored to allow the government of Israel to fully explain to the world why it had entered the Temple Mount and what it had discovered there. To do so, it assembled a pool of journalists and camera crews from the world’s most authoritative news organizations and took them down through the network of aqueducts and cisterns, to the newly dug chamber 167 feet beneath the surface. There the chief of staff of the IDF showed them the massive bomb, while the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority walked them through the remarkable collection of artifacts that had been unearthed by the Waqf during years of reckless digging. The highlight of the tour were the two rows of limestone pillars, twenty-two in all, that had been part of the heikhal of King Solomon’s First Temple of Jerusalem.
As expected, the reaction to the news was mixed at best. The video of the ancient pillars electrified the Israeli public and sent a tremor of anticipation through the global community of archaeologists and ancient historians. Most scholars immediately
accepted the pillars as authentic, but in Germany the leader of a discipline of archaeology known as biblical minimalism dismissed them as “twenty-two hunks of wishful thinking.” Not surprisingly, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority seized on that statement when issuing its own response to the news. The pillars were an Israeli hoax, it said. And so was the “so-called bomb.”
But what had led the Israelis to enter the Temple Mount in the first place? And who had been the ultimate mastermind of the plot to bring it down? The Israeli government, citing its long-standing refusal to comment on matters related to intelligence gathering, declined to go into specifics. But as the pillars emerged slowly from the earth, a series of stories appeared in the press that began to shed a diffuse light on the mysterious chain of events that had led to their discovery.
There was the exposé in Le Monde about a Sorbonne graduate named David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, who had advised the Waqf on archaeological matters, and who, according to unnamed law enforcement officials, was a member of a criminal antiquities smuggling network with links to Hezbollah. And the story in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about an Iranian connection to the bombing of Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz. And the investigative follow-up in Der Spiegel that linked David Girard to one Massoud Rahimi, the Iranian terrorist mastermind who had been briefly kidnapped in Germany. Which made it all the more interesting when, just twelve days later, that same Massoud Rahimi was killed in Tehran by a limpet-style bomb planted beneath his car. The television terrorism analysts had little doubt about who was behind the assassination or what it meant. Massoud had been the mastermind of the Temple Mount plot, they proclaimed, and the Israelis had just returned the favor.
But there were many aspects of the story the press would never learn, including the fact that the affair had begun when Gabriel Allon, the wayward son of Israeli intelligence, had been summoned to St. Peter’s Basilica to view the corpse of a fallen angel. Or that Gabriel had spent the last two weeks sitting beside the hospital bed of the archaeologist whose blood stained the pillars of Solomon’s Temple. As a result, he was present when the archaeologist finally opened his eyes. “Rivka,” Eli Lavon murmured. “Make sure someone looks after Rivka.”