Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

“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.”

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 seemed precariously close to war.