Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

He looked at his watch: 2:27. At Darwish’s instructions, the man known as Mr. Farouk had set the timing device on the weapon to go off at three o’clock. He had chosen the time, the supposed hour of Christ’s death on the cross, as a calculated insult to the whole of Christianity, but it was not the only reason. By three o’clock, the Friday prayer services in al-Aqsa would be over, and the crowds of Muslim faithful would be departing the Noble Sanctuary. But for the moment, the three hundred and eighty thousand square feet of the great mosque were filled to capacity with more than five thousand people. Darwish had no choice but to turn them all into holy martyrs. And himself as well.

He remained in the cistern beneath the Well of Souls for a moment longer, reciting the final prayers of the shahid . Then, with the Makarov pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, he set out along a narrow, ancient passage. It bore him downward into the earth and backward through time. It was the time before Islam and the Prophet. The time of ignorance, he thought. The time of the Jews.

The first aqueduct terminated after about fifty feet in a small fishbowl of a cistern, so they quickly retraced their steps to the Great Sea and entered the second channel. After just a few steps, Lavon came upon an aperture in the right side that led to still another passage. The ground was littered with fragments of loose limestone. Lavon inspected them in the glow of his headlamp and then ran his hand over the edges of the opening.

“This is new.”

“How new?”

“ New new,” Lavon said. “It looks as though it was cut quite recently.”

Without another word, he set off down the conduit, Gabriel at his heels. After a few paces, there appeared a flight of wide, curving steps that were obviously carved by modern stone-cutting tools. Lavon plunged downward in a rage, with Gabriel a few steps behind, struggling to keep pace. At the bottom of the steps was an archway with a few characters of Arabic script carved into the stone above the apex. They shot past it without a glance. Then, awestruck, they came suddenly to a stop.

“What the hell is that?” asked Gabriel.

Lavon seemed incapable of speech.

“Eli, what is it?”

Lavon took a few tentative steps forward. “Don’t you recognize them, Gabriel?”

“Recognize what , Eli?”

“The pillars,” he said. “The pillars that were in the photograph.”

“And where are the pillars from?”

Lavon smiled, breathless. “ ‘The House which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.’ ”

“What is it, Uzi?” the prime minister asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“Eli thinks he just found remnants of the First Temple. And by the way,” Navot added, “they also found the bomb.”

The prime minister looked up at the video monitor and saw thousands of Muslims streaming out of the al-Aqsa Mosque. Then he looked at the men seated around him and gave the order to send in the police and the IDF.

“It’s better than the alternative,” Navot said, watching as the first Israeli forces entered the Noble Sanctuary.

“We’ll see about that.”

THE CAVERN WAS THE SIZE of a school gymnasium. Tilting his headlamp skyward, Gabriel noticed the crude light fixtures hanging from the roof and the power line that snaked down one wall to an industrial-grade switch. Throwing it, he flooded the vast space with a heavenly white light.

“My God,” gasped Eli Lavon. “Don’t you see what they’ve done?”

Yes, thought Gabriel, running his hand over the glassy smooth surface of the freshly hewn wall. He could indeed see what they had done. They had carved a massive hole in the heart of God’s mountain and turned it into a private museum filled with all the archaeological artifacts that had been unearthed during the years of reckless construction and secret excavations—the building stones, capitals, columns, arrowheads, helmets, shards of pottery, and coins. And now, for motives even Gabriel could scarcely comprehend, Imam Hassan Darwish intended to blow it all to bits—and the Temple Mount along with it.

For the moment, though, Eli Lavon seemed to have all but forgotten about the bomb. Entranced, he was making his way slowly through the artifacts toward the two parallel rows of broken pillars that formed the centerpiece of the exhibit. Pausing, he consulted his compass.

“They’re oriented east to west,” he said.

“Just like the Temple?”

“Yes,” he said. “Just like the Temple.”

He walked to the eastern end of the pillars, touched one reverently, and then walked a few steps farther. “The altar would have been here,” he said, gesturing with his small hand toward an empty space at the edge of the cavern. “Next to the altar would have been the yam , the large bronze basin where the priests would wash before and after a sacrifice. Kings Seven describes it in great detail. It was said to be ten cubits across from brim to brim and five cubits high. It stood upon twelve oxen.”

“ ‘Three facing north,’ ” said Gabriel, quoting the passage, “ ‘three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east, with the tank resting upon them.’ ”

“ ‘Their haunches were all turned inward,’ ” said Lavon, completing the verse. “There were ten other smaller basins where the sacrifices were washed, but the yam was reserved for the priests. The Babylonians melted it down when they burned the First Temple. The same was true of the two great bronze columns that stood at the entrance of the ulam , the porch.”

“ ‘One to its right and one to its left,’ ” said Gabriel.

“ ‘The one to its right was called Jachin.’ ”

“ ‘And the one to the left, Boaz.’ ”

Gabriel heard a crackle in his earpiece followed by the voice of Uzi Navot.

“We’re trying to get to you as quickly as possible,” Navot said. “The police and IDF have entered the Temple Mount compound through the eastern gates. They’re meeting resistance from the Waqf security forces and the Arabs coming out of al-Aqsa. It’s getting pretty ugly right above your head.”

“It’s going to get a lot uglier if this bomb explodes.”

“The bomb disposal teams are coming in the second wave.”

“How much longer, Uzi?”

“A few minutes.”

“Find Darwish.”

“We’re already looking for him.”

As Navot fell silent, Gabriel looked at Lavon. He was staring toward the roof of the cavern.

“Jachin and Boaz were each crowned with a capital that was decorated with lilies and pomegranates,” he said. “There’s a debate among scholars as to whether they were freestanding or whether they supported a lintel and a roof. I’ve always subscribed to the second theory. After all, why would Solomon put a porch on the house of God and leave it uncovered?”

“You need to get out of here, Eli. I’ll stay with the bomb until the sappers arrive.”

Lavon acted as though he hadn’t heard. He took two solemn steps forward, as though he were entering the Temple itself.

“The door that led from the ulam into the heikhal , the main hall of the Temple, was made from the wood of fir trees, but the doorposts were olive wood. They burned when Nebuchadnezzar put the First Temple to the torch.” Lavon paused and placed a hand gently atop the ruins of one of the pillars. “But he couldn’t burn these.”

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.